


Man in the Box

by buckybleeds



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ableism, Ableist Language, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Hydra Won (Marvel), Anal Plug, Anal Sex, Blood and Gore, Box Bondage, Castration, Catheters, Character Death, Claustrophobia, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Degradation, Enemas, Explicit Sexual Content, Fucking Machines, Gangbang, Genital Torture, Glory Hole, Guro, HYDRA Trash Party, Hydra Clint Barton, Hydra Tony Stark, I mean i tried but everyone i know is much too sensible for that, Id Fic, Lobotomy, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Medical Torture, Muteness, Mutilation, Necrophilia, Non-Consensual Bondage, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Beta Read, Oral Sex, Overstimulation, Permanent Injury, Prostate Massage, Public Use, Rape, Self-Mutilation, Sexual Slavery, Sign Language, Torture, and fucked him for a year, because i'm sure it's something, do you honestly think i'd inflict this mess on a beta reader?, hydra won and locked steve rogers in a box with a hole cut in it, if there's something that you find horrible or triggering, internalized ableism, it's probably in this fic, let me know what i missed in the tags, look i don't even know how to tag this, look i said it was an idfic and i can't explain it any better, morse code via anal sex, not soul suckingly miserable ending at least, not steve or bucky, rape of an intellectually disabled character, reasonably happy-ish ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:21:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27971492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckybleeds/pseuds/buckybleeds
Summary: This is the fic I've been referring to as "the horrible boxfic."Hydra wins and Steve gets put into a put into a sex vending machine in the Strike team locker room.
Relationships: Alexander Pierce/Steve Rogers, Clint Barton/Brock Rumlow, Clint Barton/Hydra Agents, Hydra Agents/Steve Rogers, Jack Rollins/Brock Rumlow, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers/Brock Rumlow, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 38
Kudos: 140





	1. The Man in the Box

**Author's Note:**

> Title and chapter titles from the excellent Alice in Chains song "Man in the Box"
> 
> ALL OF THE WARNINGS. 
> 
> This is very much a fic that *I*, me, buckybleeds, the creator of the fucking tsumfic, wrote and went "uhhhhhhh maybe this is too much."
> 
> It's A LOT. BE WARNED. IT is TRASHGARBAGE. IT IS NIGHTMARE FILTH. 
> 
> Click to end notes for spoilery warnings for the worst of the worst bits just in case.

You couldn't tell who was in the first box. That was half of the point of it, really. Whoever was in there had forfeited their status as a person and been reassigned as stress relief. 

It showed up in the locker room on a Wednesday. No fanfare, nothing special. Just a box between the urinals and the showers.

Kind of a big box in general, small when you realized there was a person in it. It was stainless steel and pretty unremarkable except for the cutaway showing off a pert, round ass. 

There was a coin operated steel plug on a mechanical hinge. It was fifteen minutes for a quarter to unlock the hole but the lube and condom dispensers on top of the box were free. 

Rumlow had used it a couple of times after a rough day of hunting down insurgents and rebels. He had used it the day they took the Widow down and after his last encounter with the Hulk it had been necessary and life-affirming. 

It was a good ride, hot and tight even if it had seen a lot of use before he got to it. 

He did sort of want to tape up a sign over it telling people to clean up after themselves because some days it was messier than the breakroom microwave but it got cleaned out every night and he supposed that some folks liked their fucks nasty and it wasn't really his place to judge. 

* * *

They pulled him out for six hours a night to feed him and clean him and let him stretch out his cramped muscles while they hosed out his box. 

He was allowed to use a toilet and have the gag out but he wasn't allowed to speak or sleep. 

Those rules didn't bother him much anyway. He hated the sounds that came out of his mouth since they'd taken his tongue and he was getting good at sleeping between cocks in the box. Hell, sometimes it barely woke him up when the plug got pulled out and a person pushed in. 

It took him about half an hour to be capable of standing out of the contorted pose the box held him in. Once he was mostly upright he stumbled into the showers and douched. They'd make him take a proper enema before he went back in but he didn't want to spend his limited free time feeling jizz drip down his leg. 

He showered off the sweat from a day of use and devoured a large bowl of the protein-rich slurry they fed him. He was, as usual, surprised by how much he could taste without his tongue and also surprised at how good the food tasted. 

He would have expected HYDRA to feed him some disgusting slop that slowly starved him but apparently it was more important to ensure that he was fit for duty, such as it was. He cradled the bowl in his right hand and handled the spoon with his left. It was better at things like that these days. 

Food eaten, he began his strength and flexibility exercises. Strength didn't matter so much these days but he wanted to maintain as much muscle as he could without his body producing its own testosterone anymore. And flexibility was vital, unless he wanted to stiffen up so much that one day he wouldn't be able to stand up out of the box.

He didn't want to die in there. 

He stretched and exercised and was fed twice more. His keepers started the video call and he was allowed to watch one screen while the other keeper walked away, keeping the phone in his pocket so his path couldn't be followed but not interrupting the call. 

The keeper got to the storage room and took out his phone, holding it like he was taking a selfie, and there was Bucky, whole and frozen and not on his knees. 

Just like they promised. Just like they needed to to keep Steve in line. 

The keepers traded off. Whoever stayed with him got his mouth, whoever walked to the storage room got his ass. 

Steve was hard at work swallowing around a cock when the second keeper pushed into him from behind. 

Not many people used his mouth. He wondered, in a vague, distant way, what it felt like to them. Tongue had been such a feature of his technique before that he couldn't quite understand what they got out of using him without it. But the keepers seemed satisfied with a wet hole, suction, and no teeth so he wasn't about to look a gift horse in the dick. 

When they'd both finished inside of him they put him on his hands and knees in a shower stall and filled him with warm water. His least favorite part of his time out of the box was watching his belly fill and sag. His muscles were too strong for the weight of the water alone to do it so he had to consciously relax his abdomen in a way that felt disconcertingly vulnerable. 

That, out of everything he did for them, felt the most like a violation, the most like giving in. 

They had him hold it for about half an hour, and when they let him release it necessitated another shower. 

He cleaned off, dried off, and went to his box. 

He knelt in it without prodding and the keeper locked the outer cuffs of the restraint bar in place around his ankles. He started to bend forward so he could have his wrists locked between his feet but the keeper stopped him, holding up a thick plastic bag and a tube. 

"A reward for good behavior, Cap," he said, and Steve didn't understand until he started lubing up the end of the tube and Steve recognized it as a catheter. 

Somewhere deep and dark inside of him he was ashamed of the excited little shimmy he did, but here in reality where he had to either hold his urine for eighteen hours of hard use or kneel with his face in his own piss until his shift was over Steve knew to be grateful for the gift that this was. 

He still had enough muscle in his mouth for some sounds. 

" 'k oo," he said, and leaned back with his hands at his sides to give the keeper room to work. 

It was painful, but the catheter was both sterile and lubricated so it went inside him easy enough. The keeper even taped the tube to his thigh so it couldn't fall out and Steve wanted to weep with gratitude. 

He bent down, then, and his wrists got locked in place between his ankles. 

The position put his face on the ground, resting his shoulders on a padded support yoke, and placed his ass on the smooth, rubber-lined cutaway that made his hole available to use while keeping the rest of him safely locked away. 

He turned his face and opened his mouth for the thick, hollow pecker gag that would keep any noises he made from irritating his customers. One keeper fed it to him and buckled the harness around his head while the other started wetting him to take the payplug.

They closed the lid and he heard the electronic locks slide into place. The plug mindlessly and inexorably came down to fill him.

For a moment the only source of light was the air vent over his head, but then the screens on either side of him flickered to life. 

Screen days were always interesting. He wondered what he'd done to earn a catheter and a screen day at the same time. 

The one to his left was a feed from a camera directly over his box, facing his customers at head height so he could see who was using him. The screen on his right showed a wider view of the locker room that let him see his box from a different angle and let him watch what was being done to him. 

It was less stressful than being surprised every time the payplug started to move out of him, so Steve liked screen days. 

Nothing moved on the screens for about ten minutes, the screen on the right showed the locker room door opening and a hand landed on his ass with a companionable smack. The vibration of the steel under his ass told him that someone had fed the box a quarter before the plug even started to move. 

He turned his head to the other side and watched Tony Stark slick a handful of lube over himself before Steve felt a cock push against his hole and begin to press inside. 

Steve didn't want to watch Tony doing this to him. Tony didn't know who was in the box or he'd have been a lot rougher, but Steve didn't like the thought that the person Tony had become could do this to  _ anyone _ .

He didn't have to watch. He just closed his eyes and ignored what was happening and tried to take a nap to start the day off right. 


	2. Buried in my Shit

Some days were worse than others. 

One day the plumbing in the locker room had needed repairs. 

Someone left a funnel on top of the box and when he'd come out that night he was so full of piss that it had taken hours to drip out of him. 

One day a few different hands stretched him open so wide he was sure he'd torn and it took him a long time to understand from the warm weight that dropped into him that someone had managed to shit inside of him. 

That was one of the few times he'd vomited inside the box, which was a punishment in and of itself.

Some days nobody touched him. 

He had thought, at first, that those would be the days he liked the most but they were actually the worst. 

If nobody used him or slapped his ass in passing or clanged hard against the roof of the box with loud metal he started to worry. 

He'd worry that the base had been abandoned and he'd been left to starve. He'd worry that there was a fire in the building and that soon the sides of the box would start to burn and the steel plug would roast him from the inside. 

He'd worry that HYDRA had been defeated and that nobody would look for him, or if they did they'd open the box and realize it was exactly where he belonged and they'd take one look at him on his knees and would close the lid again. 

* * *

You couldn't tell who was in the second box either, but the second box narrowed down the possibilities of the first box a lot. 

In isolation the first box seemed straightforward and uninteresting. There was a POW in there, his choices were to be a good box boy or die screaming, and that was it. Nothing out of the ordinary. 

The first time they changed the plug size on the second box because it was starting to get loose enough to leak, Rumlow realized the differences between the two. 

On an average day of use Two was sagging by lunchtime and too fucked- out to grab back by around three, no matter how well-lubed the thing was. One was always tight, always strong. Once in a while someone would get a little rough and the holes would bleed - Two would trickle down the front of its box but the most you'd get out of One was a little red on your dick. 

One day Brock set fifty bucks in quarters on top of each box with the note "Plz use hard, invite ur friends, am running an experiment" and left for the day. When he got back the locker room was empty and the boxes were filthy. Both of them had been fucked full enough to leak when they were open but Two was so sloppy and loose that it was leaking around the plug while One was just as tight and fresh as always. 

Brock put a quarter in each box and wrinkled his nose in disgust as Two prolapsed slightly before its body pulled the puffy red bulge back inside. The nasty thing was on its third plug, which was about two inches through the center. One was still tight and sweet on a plug barely as thick as Brock's thumb. 

He pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves and put two fingers in each hole, One on his left, Two on his right. One felt smooth and grabby, like it always did. Two was loose and squelching. There was a funny shaking running through it that took a second to place. 

When Brock realized that he was feeling the man in box two sobbing through his raw asshole he had to fumble his pants down to get his dick inside of it. He didn't even pause for a condom, he had to know what that felt like on his dick even if he had to fuck through twelve hours worth of congealed jizz to do it. 

It was worth it. Two wasn't tight but it was hot and wet and when Brock fucked in hard the shaking intensified. 

The hole felt like a loose pussy around him it was so wet; those little shakes twitching around him felt like a cunt coming with its rhythmic flutters. 

He thought about finishing there, thought about hurting whoever was in the box some more, thought about making him cry harder.

In the end he pulled out and didn't even wipe the mess of blood and come of his dick before fucking into the burning hot heaven that was One's daisy-fresh hole. 

He ended up taking his time, feeding two more quarters into One's box before he finished. 

It had cost him a hundred bucks but it was worth it, he reflected in the shower. Whoever was in box one was enhanced, and the number of enhanced individuals in HYDRA custody who were both reviled enough to merit becoming a box toy and stubborn enough to choose that over changing sides was vanishingly small and almost certainly meant that box one was full of Steve Rogers. 

Which was excellent not only because it was great to see Cap getting what he deserved, but also because it meant Brock had a secret, and it was the kind of secret he might be able to use to get the hell out of HYDRA once and for all. 

* * *

Normally the poor guy in the second box was long gone to get his downtime before Steve's box was opened up. Today was apparently special in a lot of ways. 

It hadn't been a screen day but it sure was a busy day. He felt sore and hot and disgusting. It felt like he'd been in use for eighteen hours straight. 

So the box opened and he felt cool air on his back and he relaxed because in the next six hours he'd get fucked a couple of times, maybe, but at least there'd be time for the come in his crack to dry out between them. 

The keepers unlocked his wrists and ankles and pulled the gag out of his mouth. Steve started the little stretches that would allow him to stand up relatively painlessly in the next few minutes and filled that time by peeling the tape off his leg and pulling the catheter out of himself slowly and carefully so that nothing spilled that might make the keepers decide he didn't deserve it tomorrow. 

He'd been hearing and ignoring some nearby clanking until he heard the pneumatic hiss of another box opening and realized the keepers were taking care of him and his neighbor at the same time. 

A trill of energy moved through him at the thought. It had been so long since he'd seen anyone who wasn't HYDRA that it made him sick and excited at the same time - torn over how awful it was that someone else had to live like this and how wonderful it was that he wasn't alone. 

Then he heard the crying. 

The keepers were taking quietly to each other across the room as Steve tried to hurry along his stretches.

"The manual says to deactivate the box until further notice if it's in really bad shape."

"I know, but he's pretty tough. I don't want to lose the time if we don't have to."

"They're used to having only one hole in there. We can take this one out for a week and none of them will care."

"He can take it, I'm sure."

"You're just soft."

Steve was sore and stiff. A day of constant use had hurt him. Considering what it might have done to a non- enhanced human made him a little sick to his stomach. 

The keepers came back. One poked Steve's shoulder. 

"Pick him up and carry him to the showers. You're his babysitter today."

Steve nodded and sat up a little faster than was wise. His joints were screaming at him but that mattered less than helping the crying man. 

_ Jesus. Clint _ . 

Clint Barton was curled up in the fetal position on the floor of his box. He looked skinny and pale and streaks of red ran down the insides of his thighs. 

Steve knocked on the lip of the box and waved a little when Clint looked up. 

"Steve?" He said, managing to sit up a little and cringe in on himself all at once. 

"C-in," Steve said, as best he could, and gestured to the showers.

Clint sat up a little more and regarded Steve warily. Steve knew he looked rough. His skin was pale to the point of translucence and they'd stopped cutting his hair about a year into keeping him, long before they put him in a box. They hadn't shaved his face in a couple weeks either, so he was sure he looked just as crazy and haggard as someone living in a box should. 

Steve shrugged under Clint's scrutiny and gestured to the shower again. Clint nodded and held out an arm, which Steve carefully draped over his shoulder before standing up and half-carrying Clint to the largest stall.

Steve turned on the water and connected the douching hose. He froze before he could insert it, realizing that the dark, awful place inside of him didn't want a friend to see him do this. He held out the hose and looked at the ground, offering the device in case Clint wanted to use it. 

"Nah, I'm good man," he said, his voice scratchy. 

Steve looked up long enough to see the way that Clint's eyes were tracking over his body, taking in changes. He nodded and turned into the spray of the shower and hoped that Clint had turned away before Steve put the hose in his ass and began the process of irritating congealed come out of his large intestine. 

He heard another shower start and let himself forget about everything else until he was clean. 

When the shower was over he was surprised to see a keeper holding a fluffy white robe out to him. He took it and put it on and waited to see what would happen next. 

"Hey champ," Clint's scratchy voice went warm and all the tears ran out of it. Steve turned and saw a blonde boy smiling shyly and carrying a tray of food. Steve felt his insides turn over and go leaden. He was glad for the robe covering him but he wished it could cover his collar and his face and his whole miserable life too.

The kid handed Steve a bowl of his typical slurry and put down a full plate for Clint. Clint talked to him and asked about his mom and his sister as he ate. Steve remembered that Clint's youngest was named Nate. His oldest, Cooper, would be in his early twenties if Nate was as old as he looked. Clint hugged the boy before he left and told him to give his mom a kiss for him. Nate hugged him back hard and scampered away. 

Clint sat down gingerly and shuddered. He went back to picking food off his plate and frowned at Steve's bowl. 

_ Why are you eating that? _ he said and Steve was stunned that he'd forgotten that Clint could sign. 

He dropped his spoon in his eagerness to respond. 

_ No tongue, choke on solids, _ Steve said.  _ High energy mush instead. Who have you seen, who is alive? _

He could  _ see _ Clint clocking the way that Steve's dominant signing hand had changed. He could see him realizing why and deciding not to comment. Clint nodded and replied.  _ Banner, Falcon still outside. Nat dead. Thought you were dead. Who have you seen? _

Steve grimaced.  _ Tony, Loki, Thor. HYDRA. Maria Hill dead. Fury prisoner. Maybe dead now. _

Clint looked him up and down.  _ You prisoner all this time? Like this? _

Steve wobbled his hand in the air.  _ Experiment first. Box for a year? Maybe? You? _

Clint looked down.

_ Worked for them two years. Try to keep kids safe. Prisoner two months. Six month sentence. _

Steve didn't know what to say to that so he picked up his spoon and ate for a minute. 

_ Did it work? Keep kids safe?  _ He asked at last. 

It was cruel. He knew it was cruel, but he could never imagine taking up arms with HYDRA.

"Fuck you too, Steve," Clint growled. "Why are you here if you're so high and mighty then? Did they take you guts along with your tongue and your fingers and your balls?"

Steve barked out a laugh. It was an ugly, choking noise in the empty cavern of his mouth. 

One of the keepers piped up.

"We took his tongue but the little shit cut off his own balls. It's what got him a permanent reassignment to the entertainment pool."

Clint's mouth dropped open. 

"What?"

Steve shrugged, then signed. 

_ Serum genetic. Now nothing to pass on _ .

Clint's eyes went wide. "And they don't use the Soldier for that?"

Steve knew he could grin like a loon when he wanted to.  _ Original Recipe _ , he said, and made his awful, honking laugh again. 

Steve spent his free time much as he normally did, exercising and eating and stretching. Sometimes he helped Clint but neither of them really had much to say to each other. 

Clint sat on a bench and watched as the keeper walked away to show Steve that Bucky was still safe. He watched Steve start to suck one handler off and he was still watching when the second one got back and waved off using his ass. The keeper in his mouth finished and both escorted them into the showers for the final cleaning before their next shifts started. They knelt side by side on the tile and Clint spoke to him again.

"So that's where your guts went. Don't pretend that you're any better than me, you sanctimonious prick."

Steve looked at the grout under his fingers and felt the water start rushing into him. He wanted to argue that spreading his legs was pretty far afield from  _ working for HYDRA _ , but maybe Clint didn't see it that way. Maybe it didn't matter. 

"Man, I'm telling you, if we put him back out there it won't be pretty."

"C'mon, do you want to carry that fucking box out? He'll be fine."

"Dude. He is literally still bleeding. We've got to shut it down for a couple of days."

"Look, they were doing some dumb game yesterday, everyone is all fucked out and they like the other hole better anyway."

The keepers were cuffing Steve's hands behind his back. That was worryingly unusual enough before they clipped his collar to a D-ring by the drain. He felt the temperature of the water flowing into him ratchet up unpleasantly. 

"Jesus Christ, they're still fucking runny with it," the keeper putting a spreader bar on Steve's ankles said. "Hotter."

Steve whined a little but the keepers kept talking. 

"If we put it out and the fucking thing bleeds to death on somebody's shoes we're going to end up in boxes of our own."

"I know. But. I mean, c'mon. We've worked with him. You know him. He can take it. He's only got to get through four more months. 

"Fine. If he can handle cleaning we'll put him out. If he can't we take down the box for a few days."

"Fine."

"Fine."

Steve wondered why there was any question. It was clear that Clint needed at least a couple days to recover. 

"Okay sweetheart, just twenty minutes of this and you can go back to work, okay?"

Steve tried to concentrate on the misery of the heat filling him as Clint started sobbing again. HYDRA convert or not he didn't deserve to be treated like this. 

"I can't, please," he moaned, and the keeper petted his back before hooking up his cuffs. 

"You're strong, you can do it."

Steve was sweating from the heat inside of him and felt like he might explode with how full he was. The keeper handing him removed the hose and replaced it with a plug and passed the hose to his counterpart. 

As soon as it started filling Clint it became clear to everyone that Clint was not going back in the box. He howled and tried to jerk away as the mild, slick pressure tore open unhealed skin. 

"Aw man."

"I told you. We gotta take him down."

"Yeah, yeah. Hand me his gag and shut the other one up. I don't want them screaming when we call it in."

The keeper filled Steve's mouth with its rubber cock while Clint got a purple ball gag.

"Hey man, let me fuck him before we close up shop."

"Man, I thought you liked him."

"I do. But not that much."

"You're sick. Go ahead."

Clint squealed around the ball gag while the keeper pushed lube into him. Steve closed his eyes and the miserable noises rose in pitch as the guard shoved his cock in. The keeper behind Steve was talking into a radio. 

"Calling in a decom on box 47322, please confirm."

"Box 47322, prisoner number 28491."

"Confirm. Distribute resources as needed. I think admin has an open spot for the wife."

There was a snort on the other end of the radio. "An open spot on the wall, maybe."

"Roger that, and you can check it out once it's filled."

Steve frowned. He couldn't make the conversation make any sense. 

"Reason for decom?"

"Mechanical failure due to overuse. Please make another note that the STRIKE locker rooms are high failure zones for entertainment boxes and are not recommended placements except in capital cases."

"Noted. Again. Confirm decom box 47322, confirm incomplete sentence for prisoner 28491 Clint Barton."

"Confirmed J385KN."

"Decom accepted 0749 4 January. Countdown started, clear a two foot radius to avoid burns. You've got three minutes starting now. I'll send over a removal team."

"Roger that, thank you much."

He set his radio down and stepped back to sit on a bench. 

"Three minute warning," he called, and the other handler waved his hand. 

"No hard feelings, buddy," the man was saying, "this is just the price we pay for order. I'll give the wife your love and make sure someone checks in on the kid for you."

Clint had stopped squealing and his eyes had popped open, wide and dark with panic. Steve could hear him shouting 'no' over and over from behind the gag and suddenly realized what was about to happen. 

He made eye contact with Clint one more time. Neither of them could speak but neither had to. Steve closed his eyes. 

He tried not to hear it when Clint's collar exploded. 

He tried not to hear the keeper coming and swearing when Clint's dying body clenched down around his cock. 

He tried not to feel the thickness of the liquid running into the drain under his face so that he could ignore the copper-shit smell of it and pretend that it was water.

The keeper finished fucking Clint's corpse and together the handlers managed to get Steve empty, clean, and dry before the removal team showed up. They even gave him extra lube on the catheter so it hardly hurt at all. 

They closed his box and the screens turned on and he tried to be grateful. 

* * *

There was a note on the wall above the box. 

"Play nice with your toys if you want to keep them. Box 47322 has been decommissioned and STRIKE will not be issued a replacement for a minimum of six months."

Brock felt a tiny twinge of guilt. He hadn't meant to kill the poor bastard in box two. 

On the other hand it was going to be easier to get Rogers to agree to help him if there were fewer people he felt like he had to rescue. 


	3. The Dog who gets Beat

Someone was tapping on Steve's ass.

Tony, before he became HYDRA, might have groaned and said "it's 'tapping that ass,' gramps, not _tapping on_ " but it was both. Someone was fucking him and someone, presumably the same person, was tapping out Morse code on Steve's ass cheek. 

R-O-G-E-R-S R-O-G-E-R-S R-O-G-E-R-S

Steve thought about ignoring it. There was only one way to respond and it was pretty humiliating, plus he wasn't sure he wanted to talk to the kind of guy who'd use a person like this.

On the other hand the box was a boring, awful place to be and someone using his name instead of calling him 'hole' was a nice change of pace. 

He clenched for a two count, then one, then two twice more. Pause. Two count, one count, two count, two count. Pause. Repeat.

_Y-E-S Y-E-S Y-E-S_

The hand tapping his ass patted it companionably.

E-S-C-A-P-E

_N-O_

Y

_H-O-S-T-A-G-E_

S-O-L-D-I-E-R

_Y-E-S_

P-L-A-N

_S-O-L-_

G-E-T H-I-M O-U-T

_W-H-O R U_

B-R-O-C-K

Steve stopped responding. He felt like an idiot for giving Rumlow any leverage on him. The tapping got more insistent until it stopped altogether and then the fucking got meaner. More like what Steve remembered from when they first captured him. More like why he knew he could never trust Rumlow. In the early days Steve had liked it better when it hurt because it was harder to make him humiliate himself by coming when they raped him. Now that didn't matter and the pain of a bad angle or a finger added alongside the cock in his hole was an inconvenient annoyance, the same as the stiffness in his neck or the bruising on his knees. 

He could ignore it. It didn't matter. 

What mattered was that he didn't want to talk to Rumlow, didn't trust a word he said. 

* * *

Only Steve Fucking Rogers could be this annoying and stubborn as a goddamned box boy. 

His window was approaching and he couldn't get the thick-headed asshole to acknowledge him at all. 

Brock knew it was a huge risk to tell Rogers anything but he figured that even if he, understandably, hated Brock Rogers was the last person on earth who would snitch on him to HYDRA.

3 D-A-Y-S S-O-L-D-I-E-R A-W-A-K-E

_Y_

Fucking finally. Stubborn, predictable prick.

S-P-E-C-I-A-L E-V-E-N-T P-R-O-M-O-T-E S-T-A-R-K Y-O-U G-I-F-T P-I-E-R-C-E W-A-N-T-S S-O-L-D-I-E-R T-O C-O-N-T-R-O-L Y-O-U

_P-L-A-N_

Y-O-U S-O-L-D-I-E-R C-O-N-T-A-I-N S-T-A-R-K I K-I-L-L P-I-E-R-C-E E-X-F-I-L B-Y J-E-T

Rogers didn't answer again, but at least he knew the plan.

* * *

Three days later the keeper didn't walk to the storage room, he walked to a cell where Bucky was seated on a bench and staring straight ahead. 

He was dead-eyed and empty and horribly, beautifully alive. 

Steve put his back into pleasing the keepers. He didn't want anything to prevent him from seeing Bucky's eyes open and his chest moving with silent breaths.

* * *

There were worse things than being in the box. 

Bucky alive, not recognizing Steve, and pinning him to the deck of the helicarrier while he burned down the free world was worse. 

Finding out that HYDRA really would cut out his tongue for insolence was worse. 

What had happened to Tony was worse. 

The frightening thing about Tony becoming HYDRA was that there was never one big moment where you could clearly say he was a hero one day and a villain the next. It happened as a series of perfectly sensible individual choices. 

First he chose not to go on the run with Steve and Natasha and Banner. Of course he thought targeting people with hellfire from the sky was a bit of overkill, that's why he stopped making hellfire missiles, but he had to admit he saw the sense in tracking potential threats. 

After all, SHIELD had been tracking Killian before he was dangerous and had had a plan to neutralize him, if Natasha's data dump was to be believed. But doing more to contain him would have violated his civil rights. 

So long as the other Avengers didn't rock the boat too much he wouldn't run away to join them but he also wouldn't try to take them down. Bruce wasn't Killian, obviously. Steve wasn't Vanko. There was room for some gray area but the Killians and Vankos of the world were out there and he was glad that somebody was keeping an eye on them.

Then he teamed up with SHIELD to refine the algorithm. You couldn't have messy math targeting the wrong people - if you were going to be intervening to save lives you'd better make sure your math was right, and Tony Stark was a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist who was really, really good at math. It was his duty to see that if this system existed it existed in the best possible form to avoid collateral damage. 

He didn't want to work with a group that was going to indiscriminately kill people, but he could show them that diversion programs were worthwhile - their student-scientist threats were a good place to start. Tony had room to work on a scientific education and training program. He could even provide housing for these kids. If they weren't allowed to leave the housing and didn't have a choice but to participate in the program, well, it was better than the alternative, wasn't it? It was like terrorist screening at the airport, sometimes you had to step on some toes in order to keep everyone safe. The inconvenience was worth it in exchange for security. 

Maybe the World Security Council was right. Maybe people like Steve did disturb the order of things. He'd been given endless chances to come in peacefully and hadn't and they'd had to consider him a higher level threat. He'd destroyed a New York server stack and it had been an expensive logistical nightmare that Tony had had to jump in and solve, and it left a lot of people out of work. Steve and Natasha had also wrecked some of Tony's educational housing, which they called "liberating" and Tony called "a headache" because some of those kids were dangerously smart and anarchic and there were a couple who died in recapture efforts and that was a tragedy. They'd been working the program, they'd been safe and the threats they represented were neutralized and then Cap and the Widow had gotten all high minded about "freedom" and "due process" instead of facing the facts that global safety was more important than everyone in the world being free.

And maybe Steve looked a little more like Vanko after that. 

And then HYDRA killed Pepper. 

She'd died in the blast that incapacitated Steve long enough to take him captive. 

She'd been meeting with him secretly for months, passing on information to help him, Sam, Bruce, and Nat stay safe. 

She didn't know that Tony, in an effort to protect as many people as possible, had given SHIELD backdoors into JARVIS. She didn't know they were tracking her through the AI. She didn't know the encryption she relied on for safety was compromised from the start.

Tony blamed Steve, of course, because if Steve hadn't manipulated Pepper into meeting with him she never would have been a target.

To Tony, Pepper's death was the tragic fallout of trying to rein in a superpowered terrorist, not the victim of a fascist state. 

Tony didn't see the state as fascist, that was a word he used for enhanced blowhards who couldn't compromise to save their lives and who would die to defend their absurd ideals even if their ideals were antiquated notions of freedom in a world full of threats. 

After that things got a little clearer. Tony had refused to work with HYDRA before Pepper died, choosing to only work with SHIELD.

But that was a little like choosing to work with the DHS and refusing to work with ICE. The facial recognition you sold to one ended up getting used by the other. 

So he started doing a little work with HYDRA. One-off ops with clearly defined antiterrorist goals where an iron fist or two might come in handy. 

He worked with the STRIKE teams to free hostages in Sokovia, he went with SHIELD agents to raid a dangerous laboratory in an underground bunker. He helped to track down and capture Clint and helped broker the deal that would keep him and his family free instead of languishing in indefinite detention. 

He got used to people hailing HYDRA in the hallways and if he thought that was maybe a little gross, well, HYDRA wasn't the same as it used to be. It wasn't about racial purity, it was about order. 

Order was the reason he signed the Sokovia accords. Order was why Peter Parker was living in Stark Tower with a tracker instead of living in Queens with his aunt. Order was why Tony had helped Alexander Pierce become president. 

Steve had gotten bits and pieces of that story over the years from a lot of sources. Pepper had looked more and more worried every time he'd seen her and had been terse and unhappy when Tony's new political work came up. Tony himself had shouted across the wreckage of his baby genius prison that Steve was a fascist. The rest had come up in beatings and the locker room. 

The first time Tony had used the box Steve had heard him come into the locker room after training with STRIKE. He'd been calm and relaxed and chatting with them. Happy to be helping. He'd put a quarter in the coin slot. 

"Hah, I didn't know you had it in you, Stark," Higgins had said. 

Two lube-slick fingers pushed into Steve.

"What?" Tony had said, "it's not like terrorists are people."

So. All things being equal, there were worse things than being inside the box. 

* * *

Brock sank into the deep, sweet heat of Steve Rogers and wondered if there was a way to convince him to keep letting Brock fuck him once they'd gotten out. 

Probably not, so Brock was getting while the getting was good. 

HYDRA, for all that he needed to get away, had been good to him. He'd reaped the benefits of the early research on Rogers, before he'd cut off their source, and he was stronger and faster than he had been. 

Randier too.

So he was glad that he could take advantage a couple times a day. 

He hadn't wanted anybody since Jack had been hospitalized, and it was nice to give Rogers what he deserved, even if he was Brock's ticket out. 

He finished fast the first time. It was late at night, almost time for the maintenance crew to come in, and the locker room was empty so he didn't even bother to pull out before round two. He just dropped another quarter in the kitty and started tapping out info while he waited to get hard. The clenches that Rogers used to answer would help to get him there, he wasn't in any rush, he could be lazy about it. 

T-H-I-S W-E-E-K

_Y_

Y-E-S 

If any literal asshole could come off as exasperated and judgemental it was the one attached to Steve Rogers.

_W-H-Y_

He considered ignoring the question or lying, but what was the point? 

R-E-V-E-N-G-E J-A-C-K D-E-A-D

There was no response for a long time. So long that Brock thought Rogers was done and started fucking him to sign off for the night. He finished and was panting and about to pull out when he got his answer. 

_O-K_

* * *

It wasn't really true that they'd cut out his tongue for insubordination. At least not _his_ insubordination. 

They took it because handlers, scientists, janitors, torturers, and admin staff kept trying to set him free after talking to him. Gagging him hadn't worked because they had to take the gag out to feed him. Wiring his jaw shut hadn't worked because he cared less about pain and losing teeth than he did about escaping. Drugging him into a stupor had worked until it had briefly killed him, a relief that he wasn't allowed to enjoy for long. 

They wanted him alive and accessible for tests. They needed his body, not his intel, so it didn't matter if he couldn't answer questions. All that mattered was making sure his sad blue eyes, deep doleful voice, and overwhelming sincerity didn't convince anyone else to take off his cuffs. Executing the offenders was starting to take a toll on the HR department. 

They knocked him out for it. He wasn't sure if that was better or worse. 

Knowing that they were taking his tongue might have made him fight harder or accept his fate or - or do _something_. He'd never know because they'd sedated him like it was a routine day of horribly invasive procedures and he'd woken up missing a part of himself that he hadn't considered vital until it was already gone. 

It hadn't even hurt. By the time the drugs wore off it was healed and he was left with a smooth lump of veiny pink flesh that sat between his teeth. 

The surgeons were happy to tell him that they'd successfully removed the dorsal surface of his tongue while retaining a significant portion of the root, so he'd still be able to move some food in his mouth even if there wouldn't be enough control to masticate. They'd tested that theory and Steve had tried to spit at them. 

It turned out you needed a tongue to spit as well as to chew, and the unique humiliation of feeling soft food run down his chin like an infant changed his act of defiance into a joke at his own expense that left him more shaken than he had been the first time they'd raped him. 

It had knocked him down for weeks like nothing else had. He couldn't swear at his captors, he couldn't toss insults and bile at them. 

He couldn't beg them to stop. 

It made him smaller. It made him lose himself.

For the first time since he'd been captured Steve checked out. 

He went where they pointed him, did what he was told. He ignored what they were doing to him and let himself exist as a wounded little animal in his own head.

And then they'd put him in the chair and he was miserably, viscerally, pulled back into himself. 

It wasn't the Soldier's chair. 

They'd tried that first, before they'd even cut away the explosion-charred remnants of his suit. He'd been half- conscious and bleeding when the halo came down over his face. The first shock put him back into his head and into a screaming universe of pain. 

The second scraped over his nerves and made him clench his jaw so hard that he cracked a molar. 

The third left him shaking and whimpering through long minutes of aftershocks. 

But none of them wiped him like they wiped the Soldier.

They gave up on reprogramming him in the chair after another eighteen hours of tests. 

So it wasn't the wiping chair that brought him back, it was the extraction chair. 

Of course, he didn't know what it did when they put him in it. 

At first it was just another restraint. They pointed, he sat, they locked him in, and he waited, blank-eyed, for their hands or needles or cocks.

They turned a crank and his legs were winched apart, but instead of a line forming, a slightly-balding man in a lab coat had used a gloved hand to clinically and dispassionately lubricate Steve's dick before smoothly covering it with a clear plastic cylinder that was held in place by a thick strap that wrapped around his balls and pulled them away from his body. 

He didn't make a noise, didn't start to cry. Just looked at the ceiling and waited for someone to fuck him. It's all they ever did when they had something to hold him down. 

He was ready for it when fingers traced his crack and inserted a thick, slippery gel into him. He didn't expect the technician to simply push a short-ish, thin-ish plug into him and then walk away. But that's exactly what happened and Steve was confused. He was open and wet and that's all they seemed to want of him anymore, so why wasn't anyone molesting him? 

The tube around his cock hissed and the strap around his balls pulsed and swelled and was suddenly much tighter than when it had been put on him. He felt his dick start to throb as the suction in the tube increased and the seal around the base got tighter. He wiggled uncomfortably in the restraints. 

And then the plug started vibrating and he made the loudest sound since they'd cut his mouth.

The plug wasn't long or thick because it didn't have to be - it sat right on his prostate and purred like a Harley and he got hard faster than he had since the forties. 

He didn't want to come from this but it seemed inevitable - his hips were hitching involuntarily, humping the air, and his balls drew up as close to his body as the thick strap would let them. His heart rate ticked up, he felt fluttering start in his thighs and lower abdomen - and then the vibration cut off with no warning and and Steve was left with his cock twitching and his breath hitching and not enough simulation to make him come past the constricting rings around his genitals. 

He growled and he huffed and tried to get his breathing under control. His pulse fell back into something like its normal range, the sweat that had formed on his temples had cooled and dried. 

The vibrating started again. 

This time the need to come was overwhelming and immediate. It felt like someone had flipped a switch. His balls throbbed as the skin of his sack went tight, his cock twitched and got wet at the slit as a tiny bit of precome made its way past the restrictive seal. 

The vibration stopped again. 

By the fifth time Steve was openly sobbing. 

By the tenth time he was actually using his ruined mouth to try to beg for release. 

"Puh-ee," he whined, hating himself and what they were doing to him, "puh-ee op, puh-ee-"

His chest and abdomen were bright red and his cock was verging on purple, so dark with restricted blood that it looked bruised. 

By the time they finally let him come he wasn't even conscious enough to feel relieved. 

He woke up as a technician was removing the plug and wiping him down. She released the tube on his cock and slid it off. It felt like the skin had been worn away by sandpaper and he whimpered at the sensation only to yelp when she smiled gently at him and wrapped her hand around his cock and stoked it in a harsh grip. 

"Puh-ee, 'o," he cried, and she cooed at him in a sugary voice. 

"I know it hurts, sweetie, I know, but you have to be hard for your injection."

She tilted her head at a tray of instruments that glittered meanly in the harsh glare of fluorescent light and Steve finally just broke. Captain America hung his head and cried like a little kid because a five foot tall woman wouldn't stop touching his dick. 

He stayed limp and small and soft as every motion of her hand hurt more and more. After long minutes of useless, excruciating stroking she sneered and dropped his member. 

"Well that's disappointing," she said, and hit a series of keys on the side of Steve's chair. It began to tip him onto his back while keeping his arms fixed at his sides and his legs spread. He squirmed and tried to bring his knees together and the technician brought her hand down smartly on his aching balls, making him twitch and shout.

"None of that. We're already going to be doing this the hard way," she smirked at him and poked his cock, "or maybe this is the soft way, huh sweetie?"

Every single person in HYDRA thought they were a comedian and every single one of them managed to be the most predictable, unimaginative, unfunny assholes Steve had ever met. It was like they held tryouts.

She pushed his balls up and out of her way as she began palpating his perineum. He shuddered and groaned when she jabbed a finger hard toward his prostate. She nodded and uncapped a purple marker, making an X in the same spot that had made him jump. 

She let go of his scrotum only long enough to tear a couple long pieces of surgical tape and then taped his balls to his abdomen, clearing her workspace.

"Last chance to try the easy way," she said brightly, holding up a long, thick needle like it was supposed to scare him. 

Steve glared at her. He decided it felt good to glare at something.

She put the needle inside of him, pushing it slowly between his legs. It hurt, it hurt worse when she depressed the plunger and his prostate felt swollen with fire. He didn't stop glaring at her. 

Her hands were shaking when she pulled the needle out. 

"No sense in wasting hard work," she said, aiming for breezy and landing on bluster. 

Steve kept up his glare as she tugged his cock and balls through a steel ring. He kept glaring as she pushed something hard and cold into his urethra, and maintained it while she fitted a cage over his cock and locked it to the ring, trembling so hard that it took her three tries to attach the lock.

Steve twisted his arms and the steel chair creaked. The technician jumped away from him with a little scream. 

Yeah. It felt good to glare at something. 


	4. Won't You Come and Save Me

Nobody was sure why Rogers' first day in the chair woke him up. He'd been an unresponsive zombie for weeks and they all figured the hard part was over and he'd be a good little subject. 

They figured wrong.

Half of STRIKE Alpha was enrolled in Project Amplify so they were hanging around the labs anyway, which ended up being a good thing because even restrained in a chair with his legs spread and his tongue cut out Rogers was too much for the technicians to handle.

He started with biting. 

Technically he started with biting out the throat of the cute little researcher who was unlocking his dick. And, even though three commandos were in the room, they couldn't get her away in time to save her. 

Brock wasn't proud of it but the image of Rogers restrained, held open, wet with blood from the nose down, and making terrible, guttural laughter with his empty mouth was an image he masturbated to kind of a lot. 

It had taken two men to get the gag in his mouth and the whole research program had been downhill from there. 

Rogers bit and he struggled and he broke things. He scared the technicians and tried to come before the collection tube was attached so he could ruin the results of a day's testing before the day even started. 

It took two weeks of extraction, production increases, and fighting Steve Rogers tooth and nail to prove that the supersoldier serum could be isolated from semen for a limited period of time and could be produced at higher volume without losing potency. 

Unenhanced ovum couldn't be fertilized by superhuman sperm but it was theoretically possible to enhance and impregnate a female volunteer.

That project was sidelined until HYDRA had its own loyal supersoldiers.

Brock honestly felt a little weird about being shot full of Rogers' jizz, even centrifuged and isolated and tarted up with science. It was one thing to give Cap a direct injection of his own but it felt tremendously emasculating to be on the receiving end.

But, emasculating or not, enhancement was a powerful motivator. 

Brock and five others were given baseline testing then given a shot. A week later the three survivors were tested again. Brock’s scores had improved so he was given another shot and waited another week. 

After four weeks Brock could sustain a twelve mile an hour run for thirty minutes and could lift a Chevy smallblock engine over his head unassisted.

After six weeks they found Rogers in the lab coated in blood and laughing again and the program was shuttered for good. 

* * *

Steve broke his right arm in two places and severed his thumb, but it was worth it. He had to act fast.

They weren't supposed to leave him unsupervised for any amount of time but the Wednesday guards took their time about shift change, usually he had between forty minutes to an hour by himself. 

He counted out two minutes after the door closed and mused that the guards would probably die for leaving him alone. He decided that he didn't care, and that was one of the risks you took when you forced someone to become intimately acquainted with the feel and smell of your prick. 

There were cuffs holding his arms to the chair in three places: at his wrist, and above and below his elbow. 

He turned his hand over so it was palm-down, wrapped it around the end of the armrest and started to straighten his arm. The forearm fractured first, followed shortly by his humerus. 

But the two elbow cuffs creaked, groaned, and gave way, pulling away from the chair with the squealing sound of tearing metal. It hurt.

And it gave him enough room to start pulling his hand through the wrist cuff. 

He knew there wasn't enough room. He'd been twisting his wrists raw against the cuffs for weeks. He couldn't fit his whole hand through the cuff, so it was a good thing his arm was stronger than his skin and bone and tendons.

He closed his eyes, counted down from ten, and pulled. Hard.

It would be fine. It would be fine. He wouldn't look at the blood and he'd just have to be glad that they didn't monitor his vitals and that he'd been a little ambidextrous even before the serum, it would be fine, at least he had a hand loose.

He reached across his body and wrapped the IV tubing around his shaking fingers. 

It would be fine. 

He yanked the hose out of himself and the saline pouches and made it into a slipknot with his whole, restrained hand. He could do this.

They had been keeping his cock caged overnight, which was demeaning and painful but meant it was easier to loop the tube around just his balls and it would protect his dick from what came next. He pulled the loop closed as tight as he could and wrapped the trailing ends around the knot a few times before tucking the excess through the steel ring that held the cage in place. His balls already felt heavy and distant. A thousand years and a million miles away he'd been a boy playing with twine from the butcher, wrapping it around his fingertips until they were numb and purple. Until he could feel his pulse in them the way he felt his pulse between his legs right now. 

It would be fine.

Or it wouldn't. 

His hand was already bleeding less. The rest would stop bleeding soon too.

He couldn't grab the torn-out cuffs with a fist but he could fold his fingers around the metal below the jagged, torn edge. He could bend it back and forth on the armrest. 

He didn't want to die. He didn't want to do this. But he'd rather die than live in a chair and get tortured and raped and  _ milked _ like a dumb animal in a halter until HYDRA had an army of supersoldiers because they'd found a way to steal Dr. Erskine's gift. 

The cuff broke off in his hand. 

The edge wasn't as sharp as he would like but it would have to be sharp enough.

It would be fine. 

* * *

Alexander Pierce hadn't just been furious about the blow to Project Amplify, he'd been murderous, and even after the largely successful launch of Project Insight it was still remarkable for the president of the United States to personally execute people.

But that was part of why Brock admired Pierce. He liked to keep his hand in the game. 

The labbies had raised the alarm once Rogers was found and Brock was one of the first to arrive, early enough to the scene that they hadn't sedated the supersoldier yet. 

Rogers was alternating between laughing and clumsily slashing at the researchers with a jagged bit of metal. He was moving oddly and his lap was full of blood and the hand still strapped to the chair was a gory mess. 

Brock was wearing armor so he just walked up to the restrained man and plucked the chunk of steel out of his hand. 

The techs were such pussies, it wasn't even sharp.

Brock was stronger than he had been but he was surprised that he could control the flailing arm on his own before he saw it bending at an unnatural angle in his grasp. He was filled with a helpless surge of admiration. The stubborn sonofabitch broke his arm and still kept fighting. 

Admirable or not he was still a pain in the ass. "Will one of you fucking nerds knock him the fuck out?"

Rogers giggled.

"Oo ae," he crooned in his creepy retard voice. He clenched his other fist and something very gross began to ooze out between his fingers and drip to the floor. 

Someone put a needle in him and whatever was in his hand fell to the ground with a wet slap as he lost consciousness. 

"Hose him off," Dr. Novell was in the room. "Let's see what kind of stunt he's pulled now."

After the blood was washed away things got a whole lot louder and faster. 

"Jesus Christ get the cage off-"

"Oh God, what was he holding?"

"Don't untie that, get him loose, c'mon"

"It's just - it's - he fucking  _ liquefied _ them oh fuck"

"Where's my gurney? Get it in here and get him to emergency-"

"Irrigate it, maybe there's something we can salvage, he heals like magic"

Brock slowly got frightened. He decided it was time to exert some control of his own and pulled out his tablet. He tapped and scrolled until he found a schedule, then he radioed Higgins.

"Get the team together, I just sent you a list of names. Put them all in holding."

Mercer he called on the phone. 

"I need you to look at the last month of shift changes for the guards on Cap duty. If there are any gaps where he's unattended I want to know who was on duty and how long he was alone. Start with Wednesday nights, fucker probably noticed a pattern."

In the end Rogers had been too thorough for the doctors to do much of anything. The remnants of his testicles were unrecognizable as such, crushed into nothingness by the efforts of his own hand. A thick scar had already sealed over the remaining joint of his thumb. Nobody thought it was wise to improve his mobility by setting his arm properly. 

All they had done was trim away the ragged skin of his scrotum and stitch it neatly closed, leaving him with a small, empty pouch of skin under his cock. 

Rumlow was a little frustrated that the lack of balls just made his dick look bigger.

They'd declared his nuts unsalvageable, locked him into the bed, and left him in Rumlow's company to regain consciousness while somebody woke up the president. 

Brock checked in with Mercer and Higgins while he waited, they'd both done their jobs well. Mercer had found six guards who had left Rogers alone for more than thirty seconds, four of whom did it regularly, but two left him alone for thirty  _ minutes _ once a week. Higgins had all of the guards in holding and had gone so far as to hogtie and gag the two on duty tonight. 

Rogers moved a little. Groaned a little.

"Yeah, I'll bet that hurt, didn't it buddy?"

Cap didn't open his eyes but he did raise the middle finger of his thumbless hand in Brock's direction. 

Rumlow chuckled.

He got closer and traced a hand down Rogers' right arm, lingering at the thick scarring at the thumb. The limb was twisted from the badly-healed breaks and the shape of it against the rest of Rogers' perfect form was jarring.

He petted the arm again again. Rogers didn't open his eyes, just drew in long slow breaths through his nose. 

Brock reached over him and flipped Rogers' soft cock up against his belly.

The mutilation there wasn't so startling. In fact Brock kind of liked it. 

Rogers had done a good job with bad tools. He hadn't lost a lot of blood and he'd tied himself off low enough that he kept some of his sack. Brock ran his hand over the small, soft spot where the skin was dark and loose. Rogers made an uncomfortable noise and shifted in his restraints. Brock's cock was fattening up in his tac pants. 

Yeah, he kind of liked it a lot.

"Checking to see if they've grown back, Commander?" Pierce made it to medical faster than Brock was expecting, storming in with the head surgeon and the hospitalist on duty in tow..

Brock pulled his hand out of Rogers' crotch as nonchalantly as he could.

"You never know with the serum, sir. Someone might as well look just in case."

"I'm glad you think so, since you are going to spend a lot of time in the lab while we figure this out."

There was an edge to the president's voice that said "I made you superhuman and I can make you a sad sack like the fuckhole in this bed if you cross me."

Which was kind of why he figured crossing Pierce was generally a bad idea and he was in for a couple weeks jacking off into a cup and getting poked by doctors. 

"Of course, sir."

"Smart boy. Tell me what happened."

"We just found him like -" one of the doctors started to say. Pierce held up a hand to silence her. 

"Commander Rumlow, tell me what happened."

Brock's posture swayed a little toward attention and he nodded. 

"Shift change guarding Rogers is at 2100 hours. At 2101 Guard Smith left his post. At 2103 Rogers maneuvered his arm in such a way that he was able to break the restraints holding his arm in place. At 2106 Rogers removed his wrist from the final restraint. At 2109 Rogers removed the IV tubing from his arm and created a loop that he placed around his scrotum and tightened before securing it. At 2111 he tore one of the damaged restraints off the chair, at 2113 he used the restraint to cut away the portion of his scrotum below the loop, at 2117 he placed the tissue he'd cut into his uninjured hand and proceeded to further damage it. At 2134 Guard Whitmere entered the room to begin his shift and raised the alarm. Doctors arrived by 2135 and by 2140 were attempting to repair the damage."

Pierce nodded. 

"Where are the guards?"

"I took the liberty of putting all of Rogers' guards in custody. There are an additional four guards who have left Rogers unattended for more than thirty seconds, which is the maximum time the operating procedures allow for without calling for relief."

The president hummed and finally addressed the doctors.

"And there was nothing that could be saved."

Dr. Novell, who had been heading the project, stepped forward. 

"Unfortunately, no. We've retained some samples for testing but the damage - it's unlikely we'll be able to get anything useful."

"The Cradle?"

Novell shook his head.

"Dr. Cho was unusually willing to assist in this case but after reviewing the footage she said she couldn't do anything."

"What about a transplant? Eventually it would be his own body producing the gametes, the serum could be isolated from them again."

The doctor considered. "We'd need a good genetic match. Ideally from someone who was similarly enhanced to start - he can't even take blood from anyone but the Soldier, and then it's only plasma."

Brock felt his sweat get cold as Pierce looked over at him. 

"What's Rogers' blood type?"

"O negative."

Brock's balls stopped trying to crawl back into his body. The doctor was looking at him too.

"B pos, sir. Sorry to disappoint."

Pierce shrugged. 

"Report to the lab for testing tomorrow," he said to Brock before he addressed the doctors, "continue to explore alternate routes for extracting the serum or repairing the damage. The Soldier will be defrosted tonight and will be at your disposal for research."

He gestured for Brock to follow him and swept into the hallway. 

"Where is your team holding the guards?"

"Interrogation room three, sir."

"Lead the way."

Brock answered questions as they walked. 

"Other than the two idiots who let this mess happen, what's the longest time the guards have left him unsupervised?"

"Three minutes. Karlson had food poisoning and left his station before his relief arrived."

"And beyond that?"

"Forty-seven seconds. That and every other overage was traced back to keycode mis-entry. Jackson is the only other one who had multiple overages, once by seven seconds, once by three."

Pierce sucked his teeth and frowned peevishly.

"Mercer did the digging on this?"

"Yessir."

"I love that woman."

"Yessir."

Brock had stopped beside a door with a large number three painted on it. 

"She was going to be our Eve," Pierce said, "as soon as we knew it was safe for her, as soon as we could be sure." He glared at Rumlow while his protection detail caught up. "It degrades almost immediately. You can't store it. You got everything, Cynthia got nothing."

Brock swallowed and nodded. 

"You are going to respect that gift, Brock, or you're going to regret it."

Brock opened the door and Pierce stormed inside.

He looked at the restrained men on the floor and then took in the frightened guards on the bench that ran the length of the wall. 

He pulled an enormous revolver out of a holster hidden by his jacket. He fired two shots, which were impossibly loud in the small, concrete room. Smith and Whitmere's heads didn't explode so much as they caved in like rotten watermelons getting hit with a bat. 

"Who's Karlson," Pierce yelled, trying to be heard over the ringing in everyone's ears. Karlson tentatively rose his hand and his head crumpled like rotten fruit too.

He stood in the center of the room and waited for the smoke to clear.

"The next time any of you leave a prisoner unguarded for a single second I'm having your entire team executed. If you're sick you shit yourself and wait for relief. If the building is on fire you stay where you are and hope that someone puts it out. Understood?"

There was a chorus of unsteady "yes sirs" as Pierce turned on his heel and left. 

"Dismissed," Brock said, and called in the cleanup crew. 

Higgins waited with him. 

"Karlson wasn't one of the ones who left Rogers unguarded," Higgins said casually. 

"Is that so," Brock said. "Well, my mistake."

Higgins chewed his lip. 

"How's Rollins?"

"Still in a coma." It had been eight months. The days were ticking down. HYDRA didn't waste much time carrying dead weight. 

"Karlson was on that mission," Higgins said. 

"Huh, what a coincidence."

Brock left him to wait for the cleanup crew. He had a date with a lab in the morning.

* * *

At first he thought it was another beating. 

They'd had him less than a week. They'd been interrogating him and torturing him and it made sense in his head that they'd send the men on the STRIKE team he had been closest to because they were the most likely to know if he was lying. 

And then they cut off his uniform. 

Steve had seen things in the war, in the camps. He'd seen how certain prisoners got handled. 

Suspected that something had happened to Bucky, based on the way he had started to move along the walls of the world instead of diving into the center of attention.

_ Am I going to move like that now? _ Steve asked himself as they arranged the magnetized cuffs to their liking. 

He told himself that it didn't matter. 

They put him on his hands and knees and he was glad that he could stare at the steel floor of the cell instead of looking into their faces. 

At one point someone put their fingers in his hair and pulled his head back. Steve was so far gone that it took him nearly a minute to realize he was looking into the lens of a camera. 

They hadn't even hit him first. He'd already been wearing the cuffs and all they'd had to do to get him in place was shock him a couple of times on the back of his neck, where the camera wouldn't see it. 

Steve was an artist. He knew about how to make a visual impact. 

Captain America, whole and uninjured, was a lot more frightening to see on his knees than a broken man with blood dripping from his face would be. 

The man inside of him thrust harder and got a firmer grip on his hair. 

"You're live, Cap. Anything you want to say to your fans?"

Rumlow. He'd played poker with Rumlow, gone out for drinks. He'd let Rumlow crash at his place while his apartment was being fumigated. Rumlow was fucking him and showing him off to the camera like a safari hunter with his foot on a dead lion. 

Rage had always been Steve's home. A source of comfort and strength. He looked into the camera and firmed his jaw. 

"They're not as powerful as they want you to think," he growled, and used all of his strength to pull one cuffed hand off the floor and swing it at Rumlow.

Stun batons hit him from three different angles and his wrist hit the ground with a resounding clang. Rumlow screamed as the electricity transferred to him though Steve's body. 

He'd started laughing by the time they turned the camera off. 

They hit him then. 

That was part of why Steve liked the way they'd started to take him apart. His twisted arm and missing pieces and the bruises on his knees that hadn't faded in months - they told a story of coercion, not capitulation. 

Prisoners who behaved quietly didn't need to be silenced, after all. 

He'd been ready to fight them forever. To let them cut away his tongue and his hands and his eyes and his heart. 

And then they'd brought Bucky to him, and Steve realized there were parts of himself that he wasn't willing to lose. 

He woke up and found Pierce comfortably seated outside his cell. 

That wasn't so unusual. Pierce used him a couple times a month.

What was unusual was that he had Bucky beside him. They'd only taken him out of cryo a month ago and he hadn't spent any time around Steve.

"Do you know how to sign, Steve?"

He raised his left hand and knocked on the air. 

"Yes," Jarvis translated for him. Steve winced. It always hurt to remember that Jarvis belonged to HYDRA now.

"Good. Because we need to have a conversation about your future."

Steve didn't respond.

"First of all, congratulations are in order. You successfully killed Project Amplify. We can't isolate the serum in any meaningful way without your contribution."

Steve rolled his eyes. 

"That does not, however, mean that no one can share in its benefits. Do you know what parabiosis is, Steve?"

He shook his head.

"It's fascinating. Blood from younger mammals is injected into older mammals in order to reduce the effects of aging. Usually one transfusion is enough for lifelong benefits."

"So?" Jarvis translated. 

Pierce smiled.

"You had to wonder what they were doing with all the blood they took from you."

"Mad science, obviously," he signed derisively. 

Pierce chuckled.

"Everything about you is mad science, so that would make sense. But parabiosis is simply science, there's nothing mad about it. And you should be grateful that it exists because it's the only reason I'm keeping you alive instead of putting a bullet in your head."

Steve stared at Bucky.

"Most human and animal studies suggest that a one-time transfusion is enough to confer lifelong benefits. The serum doesn't work that way. To stop aging and benefit from its healing properties I'll need regular refreshing."

Steve wished with everything inside of him that he'd never heard of Abraham Erskine and his supersoldier serum. 

"So I need to keep you accessible but harmless. And that's what we're here to discuss."

It was hard to believe that Steve had failed so badly that his life and the war and his sacrifice and fighting aliens had all led to this. But if he needed proof of his failure it was kneeling at Pierce's feet. 

"Here's what I'm willing to offer you: if you do as you're told, stop making escape attempts, and stop trying to damage yourself the Soldier goes back into cryo."

Pierce very gently stroked Bucky's hair and Steve was furiously, intensely jealous. 

"Why would I want that?"

"The Soldier is obsolete. Useless. Ready to be decommissioned. He'll never have another mission. But I think being frozen is a more dignified retirement than many other options."

Steve felt an awful, twisting, nausea at hearing Bucky described like an object. Obsolete. Ready to be decommissioned. 

"What other options?"

Pierce's smiles were never pleasant but this one was downright nasty. 

"You don't need limbs to be my blood donor, he doesn't need limbs to be a toy for the STRIKE team. That's one option."

He didn't need to say more. Steve was going to agree to whatever was asked of him. 

"Or we could train him in the entertainment corps, that's usually for felons and traitors but I think there would be enough demand for a night with the infamous Winter Soldier that it would be kinder to train him than to let him learn on the job."

"Stop," Steve signed. 

"Or, well, he heals quickly. I bet if we cut a different place each day we could carve him up for years and serve him to the rich and curious. Would you want a taste?"

"Op!" Steve shouted, using his stupid, ruined mouth because he didn't want to hear any more.

Pierce stopped talking and Bucky shifted minutely at his feet. 

"My point is that I could make you a lobotomized quadruple amputee within the hour and I could still spend fifty years making the soldier regret being born. Or you can behave and he can go back into the freezer."

Steve nodded. 

"I get proof. You show me he's safe."

"You're not in a position to negotiate, Captain."

Steve scowled. 

"Yes I am or you would have just cut me up. You want me submitting to you, not an idiot shell, I want ongoing proof he's safe."

Pierce patted Bucky's head. Steve had never wanted to kill anyone so much. 

"People forget that you're smart quite often, don't they?"

"Yes," Steve signed. 

Pierce looked around the little cell sardonically. "I can't imagine why."

Incredibly, Steve blushed. He'd spent so long being miserable about his failures that he'd forgotten he could feel embarrassed about them too. 

"Proof."

"Fine. You'll get regular updates about the Soldier's condition."

Steve nodded. 

"Fine. What do you want from me?"

Pierce stroked Bucky's hair and pulled his head down so it was resting on his thigh.

"What do you know about our rehabilitative containment program?"


	5. Now You've Sewn them Shut

Pierce watched the first time they put Steve in the box.

His handers had been sworn to secrecy and plied with special privileges and threatened with slow and painful deaths. The serial number for Steve's box wasn't searchable in the containment program database, returning orders to contact his handlers and an escalation number that connected directly to Pierce's cell phone. 

When the door closed over him and the locks slid home Steve panicked. 

That was a common reaction, apparently. Common enough that there were protocols in place to address it. 

A wet, practiced finger slid into Steve's asshole and curled hard against his prostate while a hand slammed into the metal over his back. 

"Take a deep breath and hold it," said one of the handlers. Steve tried but it stuttered out of his lungs in anxious pants. The finger inside of him dug in again, harder, and Steve gasped. "Breathe with my counting. In, two, three, four; hold, two, three, four -"

The handler counted him through six or ten cycles before removing his finger and speaking through the air vent over Steve's head. 

"You're not gonna die, you're not getting crushed, you're not getting left in there to rot. You're getting three hours on your first ride and then you're done for the day. Count down the time if you want to, but you're not gonna like what happens if you start screaming."

Steve bit his lip and tried not to make a sound.

"Do you understand?"

Steve was supposed to be quiet. He didn't answer. 

A hand slapped his ass and he jumped. "Good boy," the other handler said, "you'll get used to it soon."

Vomiting would have made noise, so Steve didn't vomit. 

Something hard and impossibly cold was being pushed into him. A plug. The plug. The coin operated plug on the box. Because this was what Pierce wanted him to be, a vending machine for sex, his ass on sale like a slice of pie from the automat.

Steve hadn't felt like he was having an asthma attack since the forties, but that's what he felt like now. 

The rehabilitative containment program placed a strong emphasis on learning by doing. Steve got five minutes to panic after the box closed and then the container was wheeled into a low-traffic hallway. 

He felt the box settle onto the ground and heard footsteps retreating in the distance. 

He started counting. 

Nobody even walked past him for the first hour. When he did hear footsteps the first two times they walked right past him. The third time the footsteps stopped and he felt the metal clatter that meant someone had dropped a coin into the slot. 

He started hyperventilating. 

The plug pulled out of him and he couldn't stop his body from trying to hang onto it. 

A hand swatted his ass. "Greedy," said a stranger's voice. "I'll fill you up in a second, little piggy."

Steve couldn't cover his face with his hands pinned between his ankles. He heard a rustling and a thick squelching sound and bit down hard on his lower lip to keep from sobbing out loud. 

He was supposed to be quiet. 

A slippery finger pushed into him and he didn't make a sound.

"Oh, are you a fresh little piggy, is that why you're so greedy? You're still tight? I can help with that."

A second finger briefly joined the first and scissored open once before immediately being replaced by a cock. 

"You're a little slut for it, aren't you," the man using him said, and abruptly it was easy. 

Steve didn't know who was inside of him but he knew exactly who the man was. He was every tech who crawled into Steve between extractions, every orderly taking advantage of the four-point restraints, every commando on the STRIKE team droning on about how he wanted it when every limb was locked to the ground with two tons of electromagnetic pressure. 

Just like everyone else in HYDRA. They all wanted to tell you how weak you were once they'd made it impossible to fight back. 

Steve's stomach relaxed and he went back to counting. He had less than two hours left in the box and the way this little shithead was plugging away he wouldn't even be five minutes of it. 

Yes it was horrible, yes it was dehumanizing, yes it was literally objectifying him. Big surprise, Nazis were kind of shitty people. There was no point in letting them shock him with a little rape, considering the books he'd read about Mengele.

* * *

They didn't come back to take him out of the box for another fifteen hours, by which point Steve had managed to pull his right hand out of the bar restraint to clamp it over his mouth so he wouldn't start screaming. 

He was shaking and dehydrated and too cramped to move. 

Piece watched impassively as the handlers hauled him out of the box and deposited him in a shower stall where they hosed him off quickly. 

When they dragged him back to kneel in front of Pierce he still had his hand over his mouth and hadn't opened his eyes. His shoulders were shaking as he wept. 

He forced himself to pull his hand away so he could sign. 

_ Please, no more _ . 

"I'm sorry, Steve. Jarvis isn't here to translate for us."

Steve barely kept himself from falling to the ground and begging at Pierce's feet. 

"Puh-ee, o mo - puh-ee, op."

He'd counted five full hours before he started to panic again. By ten hours he'd pissed himself and bitten through his lip to keep from screaming. He'd lost track after that. The billowing fear once he couldn't pretend he'd miscounted, once he was sure that no one was coming for him, had broken something inside of him. 

Pierce reached out and cupped Steve's face in his hands. Steve leaned into the touch eagerly, desperately. Anything to keep them from putting him back in the box. 

Pierce petted his hair and kissed his forehead. 

"Every day, eighteen hours a day, for the rest of your life. This is your only purpose from now until you die. And if you've got even the slightest disagreement with that the Soldier can take your place tomorrow."

Steve shook his head and nuzzled harder into Pierce's hands. He wished for his tongue because he wanted to beg for forgiveness, beg for some other punishment, beg to be beaten or cut or anything other than going back into that box. 

"Are you telling me that you'll be good for me if I let you out?"

Steve nodded. He didn't care if Pierce was enjoying this, he didn't care if he was degrading himself. 

"You'll be good for me either way, because if you aren't the Soldier can take your place tomorrow."

Steve clenched his teeth but a panicked whine made it past them and Pierce patted his cheek and smiled at him fondly. 

"Behave for your handlers, I'll see you in six weeks."

A doctor had come into Steve's cell and drawn off a pint of blood before the box. Pierce's eyes were sparkling and his cheeks were ruddy. He'd gotten his transfusion at some point. 

Steve was suddenly very tired. A day in the box had pulled back the curtain on his life and he was exhausted by what he saw. He was on his knees and bartering his friend's suffering against his own with a man who had tried to kill the world and was playing at vampirism. He had been made into a sex toy because his captors enjoyed degrading him and because of the serum there was a real possibility they could keep him like this for a hundred years. 

It didn't matter. 

He would be fine. 

Or he wouldn't. 

It didn't make a difference. 

* * *

One day Rogers disappeared and a quiet part of Brock died. 

He didn't want to examine that too closely. Hadn't realized he'd been holding out for a rescue even as he tortured Rogers.

Why did he need rescuing, after all? HYDRA won, Brock was superhuman. He had everything he wanted.

Jack would probably wake up soon. It'd be a last minute save, down to the wire, just like all the other dumb stunts they'd traded back and forth over the years.

He didn't need help against HYDRA. They'd made him what he was. 

He certainly didn't need help from Capsicle.

He was just going to miss fucking him. That was all. He was a tight hole and pretty when he cried, nothing else.

* * *

The nice thing about being a crippled, worthless little cuss was that the chip on your shoulder could outlive nearly any span of misery and self pity.

Steve decided he was going to survive out of spite. 

It was the first time he'd been taken to Pierce since being put in the box. He'd gotten used to days on his knees, silence, and spending time alone in his head. Getting fucked in the box barely bothered him. Just like he wasn't real to the people using him, they weren't real to him - they were disembodied discomfort, for the most part. Once in a while someone decided to get creative, but that was rare and even then it wasn't like they were targeting  _ Steve _ .

He'd taken to trying to create sudoku puzzles to pass the time. He was terrible at it, which meant that it was a great distraction.

He was finding that nonsense math puzzles didn't help so much when you had to look at the person using you, but that was okay, that's what spite was for.

Pierce wanted Steve's mouth on him while a pint of Steve's blood ran into his arm. Steve was obliging him because he didn't actually have any say in the matter. 

Pierce turned a page in his briefing, Steve swallowed against the spit trying to run out of his mouth and waited patiently for Pierce to be done with him. 

* * *

Jack was lucky. 

They'd given him every chance, they'd waited until he woke up. They'd tried to train him back to speaking, or at least using a toilet unassisted.

He'd improved a little every day, but Brock saw the writing on the wall. 

He'd had every chance. More chances, more time than a citizen would have gotten. 

He'd had a year to make it back to himself. 

He hadn't made it. 

On the last night Brock had kissed him, had held him. Had opened him up one last time, gentle and sweet to the soundtrack of the damaged man's confused cooing. Jack hadn't come, probably couldn't with the catheter that kept him from wetting the bed, but he'd babbled happy nonsense while Brock fucked him and that was enough, finally, to convince Brock that Jack was gone for good and that a single shot in his IV would be a kinder treatment than years or decades as a gibbering invalid with the mind of a child. 

Brock had laid in bed with him when the doctor gave him the final push. He'd felt that big, warm body spasm and go tense, fingers stiff and tongue thick. 

He stayed in the bed and felt the body go cold.

It was for the best. They'd given him all the time anybody could ask for, it was a miracle he'd woken up two weeks ago and that Brock had gotten a chance to say goodbye at all. 

When Brock left the hospital room that was it. Nothing else. 

Defectives didn't deserve funerals, after all. Their passing was nothing to mourn. 


	6. Deny Your Maker

When you were going to stay in a box nobody bothered to make you pretty. 

That was Steve's first clue that Rumlow's tapped-out hints were more than just a cruel game. 

His keepers shaved him and cut the mats out of his hair before carefully trimming it into an approximation of the style he'd favored in the last century. 

They didn't remove his collar but they did wrap cuffs around his wrists. A silk belt was hung on his hips, swathes of dark blue fabric hung from the front and the rear but left his legs bare.

His wrists were locked behind his back and his inflexible, ill-healed right arm started to hurt immediately.

Steve realized that if someone looked at him from the front, if he kept his mouth shut, if the gauzy blue fabric draped over him correctly - if all of that, you'd never know he'd been hurt. All the ugly, broken pieces were hidden and the small, cracked perfection of his unstoppable, unbearable body outshone everything else. 

His keepers put him in front of a mirror and that confirmed it. 

He was milk pale but otherwise perfect, if someone looked at him from the right angle. 

One of the handlers opened a wide velvety box and pulled out a handful of what looked like shimmering blood but resolved itself as a choker of rubies crafted for a neck as thick as his in strands wide enough to cover his collar. They clipped it closed behind his neck and the Steve in the mirror was suddenly red, white, and blue, and Steve on the cold locker room tile was struggling not to gag as he looked. 

He was a parody of himself, a sick joke, an empty set of actions wrapped in flesh and silk and stone. 

His guards lined his eyes with a dark pencil then put thin, impractical sandals on his feet and twined long ties around his calves, making him look like a cross between a gladiator and a concubine. 

He hadn't considered that after all this time being clothed might be more humiliating than being nude. 

The hallway beyond the locker room was empty, like it always was when Steve was brought to Pierce, but this time Rumlow was waiting in the elevator. He looked imposing and tidy in a black dress uniform. He waved Steve's guards away and closed the elevator doors with the press of a button.

Rumlow hummed appreciatively as he crowded Steve into a corner and ran a hand up his thigh.

"Pierce will be on guard against you, he won't expect me to be a threat," Rumlow growled against Steve's ear while he reached beneath the draped fabric of his gaudy skirt. "The Soldier may try to stop me and definitely will try to kill me after. Handle him and handle Stark - kill the asshole if you want to. I've set charges to disable the tower's shields at midnight, our ride out should be here no more than three minutes after." Rumlow's fingers were playing with the loose skin between Steve's legs, as fascinated by his castration as he ever was. "Your cuffs are supposed to have the magnets engaged to keep you from pulling them apart," Rumlow said as he pressed something on the bindings behind Steve's back. A nearly subsonic hum that Steve hadn't realized he heard stopped. "They don't. Nobody knows that, so pick your moment well."

Rumlow's other hand had moved on to teasing at the base of the toy filling him. Steve had seen it before his handlers pushed it in and had briefly considered locking himself in the box and never coming out when he saw that it was patterned after his shield. He looked down and didn't cringe away when Rumlow pressed closer against his chest and nipped at his neck above the choker. 

"Just follow my lead, baby, and I'll keep you safe when we get outta here." His hand jabbed at the plug and Steve jerked, then nodded.

"You should stick with me after, too. There's not a lot of use for a mute cripple on the run. I'll make sure everyone knows what you're good for."

Steve managed to keep his eyes from rolling. Barely. 

The elevator doors slid open and Steve was ushered toward a raised platform with an ornate chair at the end of a gleaming table set with two cut crystal glasses and a decanter that Steve could smell was full of scotch. There was a dense cushion next to the fancy chair and Steve was carefully arranged to kneel on it while a short length of shining gold chain attached his neck to the armrest. 

There was a wall of windows that opened to a balcony on the side of the room farthest from Steve, the wall behind him was draped in black and red banners with HYDRA's squid crest. The head of the table faced the doors of the room, making it clear that the shiny chair was a throne and this room was an audience chamber when it wasn't being used as a set piece for initiations. The wall behind the throne was made up of a huge stone fireplace. Above the mantle, spotlit and centered, was his shield. Other signs of HYDRA's conquest - a scorched widow's bite, a necklace of claws, an eyepatch in a small, intricate case, and a dozen other trophies - decorated the rest of the space above the fireplace but the shield, like Steve, was given the place of honor. 

He looked at the red velvet of the cushion beneath his knees as it contrasted with the blue fabric puddled beneath him. He wondered how many ways Pierce was going to manage to say "I've captured Captain America."

Brock stood at attention beside the large double doors and a nearby clock started chiming the hour - ten - before the doors swung open on Tony's bright, raucous voice. 

* * *

After he'd put Steve in the box Pierce only wanted his mouth.

He liked Steve to hold him and keep him warm as his blood was being pumped into Pierce's body. Pierce usually read a report or dictated notes into his phone for that part, keeping his left arm straight for the needle and occasionally petting at Steve's hair or holding down the back of his neck. 

Steve wasn't sure if parabiosis was bullshit or not, but regular transfusions of Steve's blood had done wonders for Pierce over a few months. His face had smoothed out some, the red-gray of his hair had darkened into a coppery gold strung through with silver, he'd become slimmer in the waist and broader in the chest and the slack muscles in his thighs had gradually gotten more firm and solid. He didn't look like Steve, perpetually in his late twenties even as the years kept passing, but he'd gone from being a stiff seventy-year-old to having a body that seemed more like a hale fifty. 

His prick had changed too, getting hard more readily and now he was almost certain to come if Steve put in an effort, which was a relief after spending hours unsuccessfully nursing a soft cock on a number of occasions. 

Pierce was petting his hair and his cock was twitching in Steve's mouth, letting him know that the transfusion was almost done and Pierce was ready to move on to his entertainment for the evening. 

"You poor thing," he murmured, the gentle stroking of his fingers turning into a grip on Steve's neck. "It would be kinder to kill you both than to make you suffer like this."

Steve swallowed and let the hand on his throat guide him into a shallow bobbing motion.

"I'll make it better for you, sweetheart."

Steve had felt the needle at his neck but hadn't been able to do anything about it. 

He woke up extremely slowly. 

He felt days passing in between moments of consciousness - a glancing memory of the box, standing shakily in the shower, blinking in surprise at a cock in his mouth, his eyes open in darkness and a terrible pain filling his skull. Eventually time ran together correctly and his routine was unchanged: days in the box, nights with his handlers.

They took him to Pierce a week later and Steve understood that he'd lost at least a month to the strange drips and drabs of oddly passing days. For all he knew it could have been two months, or six, but seeing Pierce at least gave him something to measure on from this point forward. 

Pierce was petting him again, then pulling his face down hard until the tip of his prick was lodged in Steve's throat and the supersoldier's eyes were watering. 

He came hard and fast and was unusually savage about taking his pleasure. 

He was gentle once he'd finished. 

"Do you want to know what happened, or do you want to pretend that nothing happened?"

Steve just stared at the ground between his knees. He didn't want to be here. He wanted to be back in his box. 

"It was supposed to make it easier, make it so you didn't have to be present or conscious for this. You've been so good for so long, I wanted to give you that. A reward. To let you rest."

Steve nodded cautiously. 

"It looked like it was going to take, for the first two weeks. You were out of the box and only needed a nurse, not guards or minders. You had a real bed, in my rooms, and slept and ate well. We thought you were better."

Steve had no memory of that at the time. He bit his lip to distract himself from asking what else had happened in his real bed in his owner's rooms. 

"We knew that electroshock treatments wouldn't do it because the chair doesn't help you the way it helps the Soldier."

It would be quiet in the locker room if he was in his box right now. He could sleep, maybe.

"The science behind lobotomy has been debunked, of course, but it has nonetheless proven to be an effective tool for behavior modification. And no matter how good you are you're too strong to have unrestrained and unmodified."

Well. That would explain the headaches he'd been having. 

He started to tremble. 

It was after his third arrest, scuffed up by getting thrown in the wagon and with dirt on the knees of his last pair of un-torn trousers, that they'd told him he'd end up at Bellevue drooling in his lap if he couldn't keep his nose clean. "Incorrigible criminality is treatable," the cop had said, "with an ice pick."

The threat had stayed with him. It hadn't kept him away from union rallies or out of protests but it kept him smarter about getting out quick when things went south. 

Apparently he wouldn't have to worry about that these days. Apparently he could heal from even that. 

Back in the real world Steve was still shaking and Pierce was petting his messy hair. 

"Shhh, shhh, it's over. We know it won't work, we won't try it again. You'll just have to stay in the box until we find something better."

Steve hadn't meant to nod, but he couldn't stop shaking.

* * *

If Tony Stark was surprised to see a chained slave in Alexander Pierce's audience room he didn't show it. He just kept running his mouth a mile a minute while they made their way down the length of the table and hardly paused for breath as Pierce poured scotch and handed him a glass. 

They walked side by side, Tony speaking animatedly and darting his hands through the air while Pierce was engaged but taciturn. 

A shadow in a mask followed them into the room and marched to stand behind the throne on the opposite side from Steve. 

Steve kept his head down, suddenly seized by a longing so powerful it made him dizzy - he would give up so much for things to be different, for these people to not be in this room in these circumstances.

Only when Pierce was installed in his gilded chair and Tony was seated with a glass in his hand did he address the supersoldier in the room. 

"So is that a lookalike or did you manage to dig up the original fossil?"

Pierce patted Steve's head and picked up his glass.

"Say hello to your friend, Steven."

Steve lifted his head to look at Tony, and was met with a gleeful grin that only flickered out for a fraction of a second. 

"Whaddya know, an old dog can learn new tricks. I never would have expected to see Rogers housebroken."

Pierce raised his glass and took a sip. "Well, neutering him did wonders for his temperament," he said dryly. 

There it was again. Tony's big, wide, bright smile stayed pasted in place but his eyes went hard for a moment almost too brief to see. Steve blinked at him very slowly and got two fast blinks back. 

"How long have you had him, Jesus, everyone thought he was dead. Hell, I thought he was dead."

"Since the explosion," Pierce said, and Steve flinched. "I wouldn't have thought you'd forget that date, Tony."

Tony took a long drink. 

"No. You're right. It's just hard to believe you've had him all this time and he hasn't managed to kill himself yet."

Pierce shrugged and waved carelessly at the Soldier. "We've got ways to keep him in line."

Tony hummed and looked Steve over, reaching a hand out toward his face before asking Pierce, "May I?"

"Of course," the older man answered with a smile. "He's here for you tonight."

Tony nodded his thanks and continued his motion, his hand landing in Steve's hair and making a fist. 

"I guess you finally learned to bend a knee, pal. It's a shame the lesson took too late for Pepper."

Steve kept his eyes on Tony, fascinated by the way his face flickered between bewilderment and spasms of fresh rage. He blinked slowly, and Tony released him with an expression of disgust. 

"What do you mean he's here for me tonight? I thought we were here to talk strategy. His opinions are worthless."

Pierce chuckled. 

"Of course. We don't let the losing side plan our battles. But it's actually you, your future, and your plans I wanted to discuss this evening."

Tony frowned and lifted his glass to his mouth. 

"The work you've done with SHIELD and the CIA in the last few years has been invaluable. You've shaped the world with your skills, made it a safer place, helped to assert control over chaos. The drones you've developed have reduced protest casualties by eighteen percent, the adjustments made to the targeting algorithm have dropped collateral deaths to nearly nothing. You've done more than almost anyone in this building to bring about order."

Tony's glass was empty so he slowly rotated his wrist and let the ice clink softly as he moved. 

"You've done all of that, Tony, but there's still the question of loyalty."

Tony huffed. 

"Mister President," he said huffily, "there's no sane person in the world who would question my loyalty to America," he sneered down at Steve as he spoke. 

"The world is larger than one country. You know this. You know what kind of loyalty I'm talking about."

"Yeah, it's kind of hard to forget," he waved his hand at the squids on the wall behind him and Rumlow in his red and black uniform. "It's not exactly subtle."

Pierce smiled coldly. "It isn't subtle. Which is why it's time for you to put away childish things and stop pretending you're doing this for America, instead of for a global greater good. HYDRA is the single best protector humanity has."

Tony looked at Steve on his knees, then at his empty glass, before turning a vicious glare on the Soldier. 

"You killed my parents," he looked back to Pierce, "Howard I could understand. The kinds of things he was doing - well, okay, dad didn't like oversight. But you've got a pet assassin. You could have killed him when he was alone. Made it look like a heart attack. Why did my mother have to die for order?"

Pierce leaned forward and took up the decanter, refilling Tony's glass and refreshing his own drink. 

"Tony, if Pepper had survived you know we would have had to monitor her. Maybe even put her under house arrest, given the extent of her involvement with the resistance," Pierce put a hand on the back of Steve's neck. "Captain Rogers is very persuasive, but he didn't convince Miss Potts to pass my travel itinerary to Miss Romanov. Pepper knew what she was doing."

Tony clenched his jaw, but nodded. 

"Your mother was well aware of the work your father was doing. We have samples of correspondence between her and Peggy Carter discussing the acquisition of blood and tissues to attempt to recreate Howard's previous success," the hand on Steve's neck shook him slightly, and he allowed himself to be moved by it. "If your mother had lived she would have continued that legacy, and the dangerous work of creating supersoldiers - independent, deadly weapons unanswerable to any oversight - would have continued."

Tony shook his head. 

"She would have given everything to Peggy. All the files that stayed locked away because you didn't want to see them. It's a tragedy that your father decided to share that knowledge with her. If he'd kept her out of this - well, a lot of things would be very different."

Tony put the heels of his hands over his eyes and scrubbed at his face while taking a deep breath. 

"We'll have to agree to disagree on that, Alex. But why HYDRA has done for the world or to my parents doesn't explain," he gestured at Steve, "that, or why he's here."

Pierce lifted the hand from Steve's neck and grasped the hair on the crown of his head, pulling hard and baring his throat. 

"When someone joins up officially it's traditional to celebrate."

Steve slow-blinked at the ceiling while Tony Stark, for once in his life, was speechless. His mask snapped back into place quickly, but not fast enough to hide his genuine revulsion at the idea of using Steve for that. 

"What, champagne and confetti aren't good enough for you? Alex, that's part of why I haven't taken up the black and red. You can't treat people like this."

Pierce's smile got hard and mean. 

"I believe you once summed up the matter by pointing out that terrorists aren't people," he released his grip on Steve's hair and Steve immediately bowed his head to hide his face. "You don't have a problem with using him to celebrate a victory in the field, after all."

Tony's brow furrowed and his eyes darted between Steve and Pierce.

"I - I don't understand," he said, though from his dawning expression of horror Steve could see that he did. 

"Tony. You've compromised a lot in the last few years and it's been hard on you. Stop compromising and start living by your convictions. Stop pretending it's the US you're loyal to when you know it's HYDRA. Stop pretending you don't want what you want. And don't pretend to me or yourself that you're above using the box in the locker room, because we both know that isn't true."

Tony looked poleaxed.

"The - but - the boxes are for - they're supposed to be for -"

Pierce tilted his head. 

"They're punishment for violent, dangerous criminals as an alternative to execution or a longer prison sentence," he gestured at Steve. "Violent, dangerous criminals like the Captain here."

Tony was staring at Steve miserably. 

"I didn't know."

Steve blinked at him slowly, then did it again. 

The soft, sad expression faded, Tony cracked his knuckles, and blinked at Steve three times. 

"How many kids from my risk mitigation program ended up dying when we tried to recapture them?"

"Six," Pierce said lightly. "The youngest was fourteen."

Tony nodded, then backhanded Steve with striking suddenness. Steve absorbed the blow calmly, letting it turn his head so he didn't hurt Tony's hand.

"How about that. What do you think, Cap, was it worth it? Got a speech for me about why freedom matters more than dying to a teenager?"

Pierce laughed. 

"Oh, he doesn't talk anymore, we took care of that."

"Good," Tony said, "it's about time that someone shut him up." He set his glass on the table and nudged it toward Pierce. "So, what does hailing HYDRA actually entail because if there's an octopus tattoo in the process I'd rather not."

* * *

The video showed two Americans. 

Hikers, supposedly. 

The woman wore a scarf awkwardly, clearly unfamiliar with covering her hair. 

"POWs in the Korean war are where the idea came from," Natasha had said. "They were supposed to be showing off how happy and healthy they were in captivity but they realized their captors weren't familiar with American gestures or facial expressions."

The woman in the video closed her eyes slowly, then opened, then closed them. She was swaying a little, like she was drunk or drugged or sleep deprived.

"They smiled for the photos but made their smiles too big, fake. Grimaces. And in nearly every picture someone is flipping off the camera."

The woman in the video starts speaking, apologizing but talking about how well they're being treated. When she says they haven't been hurt, her eyes close and open three times.

"What's the point," Tony had asked, "it's not like she can really say anything."

The woman in the video was thanking God. 

"It is saying something," Clint interjected. "It's saying 'they are torturing us,' it's saying 'I'm still activated,' 'they don't know what they have yet.' She blinks most when she's contradicting the statement they wrote for her. It's the closest she can come to a field report while her captors are watching her."

"So why are we learning this," Bruce asked. "Everyone in the world knows who we are. Anyone who could capture us wouldn't have to hide what they were doing to their prisoners."

Everyone was surprised when Steve answered.

"Status reports. If it's Clint with a clear head pretending to be under Loki’s influence he blinks, if it's Clint being mind controlled he doesn't." He nodded apologetically at Clint and was waved off. "Also I get the feeling if I rush in to rescue Natasha because someone is holding her hostage then three times out of five I'm just going to be stepping on her toes. Blinking is a way that she can say 'I've got this' without letting anyone else know that they're the ones being interrogated."

Natasha beamed at him. 

"I very much look forward to you not stomping your big feet all over my ops. So, slow blinking for 'I've got this,' fast for 'that's bullshit,' and normal speed - one for yes, two for no. Remember, no has two letters, no is two blinks. Got it?"

Clint laughed. "You like teaching spycraft when it's easy, don't you?"

She shrugged. "I'm never going to be able to teach Steve not to blush or Tony to be quiet. I like giving people tools that they'll actually be able to use. Now, Tony, show me the signals."

* * *

Tony and Pierce talked for a long time. The clock had just chimed half past eleven when Tony reached out and touched Steve again, putting a thumb on his mouth. 

"So what's the protocol, does Van Damme over there hold him down? Is this a tag team situation, do we flip for heads or tails?"

Steve felt his face flush. He had thought he didn't have any shame left but hearing Tony talk about him that way was still humiliating. 

"It's your party, Tony. However you want him you can have him. Sharing is traditional but Brock won't mind waiting if you're not a fan of it when things are messy."

"It seems like you're the expert here. How's his mouth?"

Steve blinked twice, sharply.

"It's something of an acquired taste, without the tongue," Pierce said with a smile. Tony hummed and made the face Steve knew meant he was trying not to look stricken. 

"I suppose I've already had his ass, I just didn't know who it was attached to," Steve blinked once and Tony nodded. 

"Are you going to participate, Alex, or is that sort of thing beneath the President?"

Pierce poked Steve's thigh with the toe of his shoe. 

"That sort of thing is beneath me on a regular basis," he said, and Tony barked out a laugh. "But I think for now I'll just enjoy the show. I'm not as young as I once was."

Tony caressed Steve's hair and nodded. "You aren't as old as you once were either. Is that him too?"

Pierce unclipped the golden lead tying Steve's neck to the throne and handed it to Tony. "Let me keep some secrets, for now. You'll learn it all in due time. Right now we're celebrating."

Steve was pulled upright off the ground and let himself be manipulated into bending over the table while Tony stood behind him and ground his hips against Steve’s ass.

It probably would have helped if Tony was hard. 

Steve stayed still and passive and well-behaved as his skin was stoked and the silky drape covering his ass was pulled aside. 

Strong, callused fingers reached between his cheeks and started toying with the plug in his ass; pressing on it hard and then releasing it, driving it against his prostate until he voiced a little whine of pleasure that he tried to swallow up. 

"Oh, he likes you," Pierce said, "he never cries for us."

The fingers were reversing their motions now, tugging at the base of the plug and letting the hard silicone tease him open from the inside out. Tony slid the fattest part of the plug in and out of the tight ring of muscle before withdrawing it completely. 

The plug was large enough that it left Steve a little gaped when it was pulled away, the unusual slackness making him feel vulnerable and sloppy. His handlers had put so much lube inside of him earlier that he could feel it starting to drip out of him and trickle down his thigh. 

"Aww, you all wet for me sweetheart?" Tony jabbed three fingers into Steve and his breath hitched as he looked away from the table in front of him and straight into the furious, glittering eyes of a fully conscious, pissed-off Bucky Barnes. 

* * *

The Soldier was warm and walking. 

It wasn't thinking, because weapons didn't think. 

They hadn't put it in the chair when they removed it from storage. "Milk run, no threat," someone had said, and this was an oversight that might have concerned the Soldier, but weapons didn't have concerns. 

The Soldier was with its handler but paying attention to the package, which was the President, which was its only programmed goal for as long as it could remember: protect the President.

The President looked strange. Bigger. Lighter. Blonder. The President didn't look like the old man the Soldier used to protect. The President looked like he could probably handle taking care of himself. 

They went into a room that the Soldier immediately hated because the glass-walled balcony along one side made it very difficult to protect the President from sniper fire. 

There was an even blonder blonde man wearing chains and not much else beside the President's chair. The Soldier immediately hated him too because a single glance let the Soldier know that this man was extremely dangerous, but his submissive position and decorations informed the Soldier that he wouldn't be allowed to remove this threat from the President's presence. 

The Soldier knew what it was like to be kneeling and decorated and dangerous next to the President. It was a stupid risk to take but the President liked that more than he liked anything else. 

Well, maybe the very blonde man was like the Soldier and was not a real threat. 

The Soldier stood beside the President and faced its handler at the other end of the room. He wasn't like he used to be either. Like the President. Like Steve. He hadn't been as strong or as big before. He was slightly more of a threat than he used to be but wasn’t considered a danger to the President.

The Soldier wasn't certain about that, but the certainty of a weapon didn't matter. 

The President and the small, dark-haired man who could become a fighting wall of steel spoke and consumed alcohol. 

The small man said 

"Steve" and

"Cap" and

"You killed my parents," and the longer they talked the more the Soldier felt like there was something drastically, catastrophically wrong with the blonde man, and finally he was pulled up and bent over the table and Bucky winced in sympathy as the dark-haired man started toying with his hole and the Soldier frowned at the milk-pale skin and bright gold hair and then the blonde man was Stevestevesteve _ steviestevecapstevebaby _ stevesteve making a noise that went right to Bucky's heart and his dick because he'd heard Steve make that wanting little whine a thousand times and now he was handcuffed and his drawing hand was mangled and missing fingers and he was dressed like a virgin sacrifice in a trashy matinee and someone was about to fuck him on a table in front of Bucky while he was trying to be quiet and small and good in a way that Bucky hated himself for recognizing from years and months and horrible hours on his own back or stomach or knees and the small man was pulling out the plug and Christ how had that thing fit in his poor little guy who was so tight and sweet that sometimes Bucky had to loved to open him up on his tongue for hours before he could take a cock and the plug on the table terminated in a red white and blue circle with a star in the center and Bucky didn't realize he was moving against orders, that the Soldier had removed its goggles, that its strong left hand was a fist, and then hurt, stubborn, bright blue eyes looked up and found his and it didn't matter that weapons don't fly, Bucky was flying through the air to rip apart the man who was touching Steve. 

* * *

When Brock had told Steve to pick the correct moment to reveal that his hands were free he probably hadn't predicted that the correct moment would be while preventing Bucky Barnes from ripping Tony Stark's throat out with his teeth, but since that  _ was _ the moment it was good that Rumlow managed to take advantage of the chaos. 

Steve looked up, saw that the Soldier had removed part of his mask, and realized he was going to try to kill Tony about a tenth of a second before it happened. 

He wrenched his arms apart while kicking Tony away and managed to snatch Bucky out of the air and slam him into the table hard enough to crack the polished wood. 

Pierce had shoved himself up out of his throne and was shouting, Tony appeared to have hit his head on the wall and was picking himself up off the ground.

Bucky growled like a feral dog and lunged for Tony. Steve lost his grip with his right hand and was pulled along until he managed to knock the Soldier off balance and throw himself on top of him. 

Tony, for his part, looked up and saw wide-eyed death descending upon him and tried to scramble away long enough to call his armor. 

Bucky twisted and broke Steve's hold again and a gunshot temporarily put an end to the chaos in the room. 

Steve, Bucky, and Tony all flinched at the sound and simultaneously identified its source as the cartoonishly large smoking gun in Rumlow's hand. 

The awkward silence after the gunshot was broken by a squishy thud as Alexander Pierce's whole body and the surviving half of his head fell to the floor. 

The Winter Soldier looked at the messy pile of blood, bone bits, and bespoke wool and accepted his failed mission with good grace by returning with single minded focus to the task of killing Tony, who was by that time half into his armor and repelling metallic punches with similarly metallic blocks.

Steve decided he was too goddamned tired and too goddamned traumatized to deal with this shit so he stood up, knocked Bucky down, tossed Stark toward the balcony, and ripped his shield off the wall, bringing part of the wall with it. 

The next hit that Bucky aimed at Tony got blocked by three feet of vibranium and the resulting horrendous noise made everyone in the room regret being there in particular and being born in general. 

Bucky shook off the sonic assault first and once again started to charge Tony.

Steve gave up on hoping that a sensible approach would work and instead grabbed the front of the Soldier's tactical jacket, reeled him in, and attempted to suck his entire tongue into his mouth. 

Which worked brilliantly until the clock struck midnight and a distant-but-enormous explosion shattered the fragile continuity of the room. 

"What," Tony shouted, "in the name of fuck, is going on here?"

And then Steve was vaulting away from Bucky and hoping Tony could handle him in the suit because Brock was aiming his Desert Eagle at Tony and giving orders. “Strip off everything that can be used to track you, we’re leaving. Soldier, come here."

Bucky stopped looking at Iron Man the way that cats look at aquariums, hoping to pry them apart and get at the tasty fish inside, and approached Brock.

That was when Steve realized that he felt sick. Very, very sick. He stumbled against the table and started to shiver violently. 

There was a tugging sensation on his throat. He was on the floor again, hands and knees. He didn't want to be on the ground. He felt something snap and the ruby necklace fell away from him in a rain of clattering red. 

His stomach heaved but he hadn't eaten anything worth throwing up so only a thin stream of bile made it out of his mouth. 

The shivering got worse, the pulling at his neck got harsher, and the room got dark. 

His last thought before he got swallowed up in the shadows was that he was so goddamned tired of being on his knees.


	7. He who Tries

"Get the collar off, they're used to terminate prisoners!" 

The handler was shouting at the short, dark-haired man in armor who Bucky wanted to kill.

Because he was scared about Bucky killing him he wasn't approaching Steve, who was vomiting and twitching, and if he could possibly help Steve but wouldn't because he was scared of Bucky that was unacceptable. 

So Bucky picked him up and threw him at Steve.

The armored man righted himself and didn't waste any more time, tearing away a beautiful decorative choker before cutting off the ugly metal collar underneath it. 

The metal man waved his hand over the collar and swore. 

"You predictable, melodramatic assholes!"

The metal man started to yell some more and was interrupted by a new and interesting threat in the form of a small jet blowing out all the windows in the room as it landed on the balcony. 

"What the fuck," the metal man shouted, earning the right to a faster, cleaner death by shielding Steve from the shattered glass.

The handler was cackling and hauling Steve up off the floor.

A small figure with a large gun was standing at the bottom of the jet's loading ramp. Her short red hair swirled in the wind. 

"I don't know what the fuck went wrong here, and I don't have time to find out," the Black Widow barked at them, "but you're either getting on this plane or you're getting shot."

Bucky approved of her attitude immediately and scooped up the shield before he followed the metal man into the jet.

Inside of the plane everything was chaos. The handler was plunging a needle into Steve's chest, the Widow was shouting at the metal man to control everyone, Steve was vomiting. 

There wasn't much for the Soldier to do, but he knelt by Steve's head and held down his shoulders when he seized. 

The blue silk wrap covering Steve had looked stupid in the throne room, it looked painfully inappropriate on the grated metal floor of the quinjet.

The metal man was still holding Steve's collar. The handler panted on the floor of the jet. 

“The fucking collar is full of fucking cyanide,” the metal man hissed, and waved a hand, making a blue schematic appear in the air beside him, “and fucking Pierce had a deadman’s switch that triggered it when his fucking heart stopped.” He was pulling an interesting array of needles out of his metal thigh and started applying them to Steve, who had stopped vomiting but was still uncomfortably pale and trembling. 

The metal man slapped Bucky’s shoulder to get his attention.

“He’ll be okay. He’s stabilizing.”

Bucky didn’t answer. He just kept holding on to Steve.

* * *

Steve woke up to the smell of a hospital room.

He didn’t open his eyes but subtly shifted and found his limbs were free to move; he was completely unrestrained. 

“Stop faking, I know you’re awake,” a warm, familiar, much-mourned voice said.

Steve opened his eyes.

Natasha. She was sitting in the sunlight, her bright hair flaming and making her pale skin glow. She had some new scarring at her throat but otherwise looked as impervious and imperious as ever. 

His hand flew to his mouth and covered it, clamping down on the watery sob that tried to escape. She stood up out of her chair and delicately set herself on the edge of Steve’s bed, patting his knee. 

“I’ve debriefed with the others. Rumlow is in a lockdown in a room we used to use for Bruce. Tony voluntarily gave up the suit and let me lock him in his room.”

Steve glanced around and raised his eyebrows inquiringly. 

“The old compound upstate,” Natasha answered his unvoiced question. “HYDRA knew where it was from the start but the security is great and Tony never had Jarvis hardwired into it the way he did in the Tower.”

Steve nodded. They’d talked about the advantages of taking over the compound before the explosion that had left Pepper dead and him a captive. Natasha must have needed it enough to justify the risk after Steve was taken. 

He tapped his throat and jutted his chin at her.

“They came for me and it was easier to let them think they’d succeeded. I’ve been underground here with Sam and Bruce and a couple of the refugees from Tony’s program for about six months.

Steve nodded. He looked at her tentatively and held up a hand.

 _Sign?_ He asked.

“Yes,” she said with a smile.

 _Thank god,_ he said, and started to cry.

It took him a little while to settle, but eventually they were able to talk. He confirmed his injuries to Natasha, let her know about what had happened to Clint, and expressed his concerns about working with Rumlow.

 _I don’t trust him at all._

Natasha shrugged. “They killed Rollins, that seems to be what soured him on HYDRA. He’s enough of a spiteful sonofabitch that he wouldn’t go back to them after that.”

Steve frowned. _He wouldn’t, but he’s still a true believer. Wants order. Wants power. Tried to tell me I should stick with him because I’d be a useless cripple on my own. He’s going to turn on us, go rogue, even if it’s not going back to HYDRA_. 

“What a shit,” Natasha said. Steve nodded his agreement. 

“And what about Tony? I’ve talked to him. He seems lost. I’ve got Bruce with him now.”

A bright bolt of panic flashed through Steve before he made himself take a breath. Tony hadn’t wanted to hurt him yesterday. Hadn’t known he was in the box. Tony wasn’t going to hurt Bruce. Bruce wasn’t someone who Tony _could_ hurt. 

_I don’t know. Tony changed. Did things I didn’t know he would do._

“He said he didn’t have much choice yesterday.” 

Steve snorted. 

_He didn’t, yesterday. He had plenty of choices when he was casually raping prisoners for the last year._

Natasha sucked in a low hiss of breath and Steve shrugged.

 _We can ask him about it later. Where’s Bucky?_ Steve was proud of the fact that his hands didn’t shake. 

“In the hallway. He’s guarding you. Wouldn’t go farther away than the door.”

That hurt and felt good and awful and warm all at the same time.

_How is he?_

“Better than I would have expected. Remembers you, remembers his name. Mostly seems to know what’s going on around him.”

_Can I see him?_

“Of course,” Natasha said, and stood up off the bed. She leaned over Steve and gently pressed her lips to his forehead. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get you out.”

Steve wrapped her in a hug, then let her go so that he could sign a response. _I’m sorry that I left you alone for so long_. 

* * *

Bucky-the-Soldier was having a programming problem and he wasn’t inclined to do a single goddamned thing about it.

He stood in a beige hallway with institutional vinyl floor tiles and let his mind go quietly to war with itself.

He was James Buchanan Barnes, a soldier taken prisoner in Italy.

He was Bucky, sweating in a tenement apartment with a beautiful blonde boy staring at him like he commanded all the angels.

He was the Soldier, elbow deep in a target and unconcerned with the screaming around him.

He was the Asset, on his knees in front of a beautiful blonde man with a hard face and a cruel smile.

He was failing his mission.

He was a mess.

He was making sure that nobody hurt Steve.

Natalia opened the door behind him. The Widow said that he could go in. He remembered her shoulder in her mouth and her small hand holding his and his finger on the trigger looking through her to his target and he knew these things all at once to be true and wrong.

He thought that maybe he needed to scream a little.

“Soldat,” she said, holding him back. “He can’t talk. He wants to talk to you, but he can’t talk. Don’t be upset with him.”

Bucky remembered Steve running his mouth a mile a minute, smiling and talking shit to a guy three times his size. Sergeant James Barnes remembered a Captain’s low voice, full of whiskey and longing in a warm pub after a long, cold ordeal.

It turned out it didn’t matter.

They didn’t have much to talk about, they just held each other.

* * *

Natasha had given Steve a reinforced laptop. It was boxy and ugly and apparently had a battery that could last fifty days of full use.

Steve liked it.

It talked for him.

The first time he’d tried to sit down with Sam and Bruce and see exactly how broken he was after nearly three years in captivity they realized there was a problem. Natasha was the only other person in the compound who could sign. 

So she’d given him a laptop and it spoke in an ugly, boxy voice and all he had to do was type what he wanted to say and it said it and then other people could respond.

Tony was disgusted with it right off the bat.

“You are a dinosaur, there’s no reason to haul around other relics from the Jurassic, Cap.”

Steve rolled his eyes and typed. “Well I’d have Jarvis translate but unfortunately that’s not an option, so you can deal with me and the pterosaurs.”

Tony glared and looked wounded and guilty. Steve figured he’d earned it. He was the one who had handed Jarvis over to HYDRA, after all. 

“We never should have let you have access to the library. Pterosaurs, honestly. So. To what do I owe the pleasure? How can I help you? Who are you and why are you in my study?”

Steve liked his laptop but sometimes it was a little hard to keep up a conversation, especially when people talked as fast as Tony.

“Just like with Pierce. We’re having a conversation about loyalty, Tony.”

The smaller man blanched and looked sick.

“I didn’t want to be HYDRA. I - they were doing it all - it was wrong. They were wrong and I was wrong and I -”

Steve frowned and waved his hand to get Tony to stop.

“You worked with them for years. Gave them facial recognition, gave them better targeting systems. You designed better bombs for them, Tony. You funded Pierce’s presidential run.”

Tony swallowed and Steve could see his eyes moving behind his sunglasses, his gaze tracking over Steve’s body. Maybe remembering the collar, the handcuffs. Steve’s mangled right hand was just beside the laptop if Tony wanted to see it. 

“I just. I didn’t know they were like that. I wanted to make the world safer. This seemed like the best way.”

Steve shook his head.

“Boxes? People who put their political prisoners in cages and rape them seemed like the best way? You didn’t know what the people who would do that are like?”

Tony flinched, and seemed like he was going to reach a hand out to Steve before he pulled back. “Steve, I’m sorry. I should have never done that to you - it’s - if I had known, you have to believe I’d never, ever have touched you like that.”

Steve sighed.

“The problem is that you shouldn’t have done it regardless of who was in the box. No matter what crime, no matter how violent. Nobody deserves to be treated like that. Not people who kill kids, not rapists, not terrorists. Nobody.”

Tony kept shaking his head.

“It - it was an alternative to a death sentence, to get out with time served after a short term. It was volunteers.”

Steve waved a hand. 

“This isn’t productive. Let’s move on. What systems do you have backdoor access to?”

Tony perked up and started talking fast again. 

Steve would have to send Sam in at some point to really dig into what had changed in Tony. He couldn’t do it himself. Didn’t have the stomach for it.

* * *

When Sam found him asleep on the floor of his closet the first time Steve was embarrassed.

By the fifth time he was furious with himself.

He knew why it kept happening - the closet in Sam’s room was just a little bit roomier than Steve’s box had been. He could kneel on the floor and press the crown of his head against the wall and his shoulders would be boxed in on each side even if the room was too long for his feet to be touching a wall at the same time. 

Every time it happened he woke with a start, signed an apology, and went back to his room.

But this time Sam asked if he wanted to stay. 

“You’re not sleeping in your bed, you’re not sleeping in your room. I don’t own enough clothes to justify a closet and a dresser, Rogers, so if you want to claim that bit of floorspace it’s yours.”

He probably hadn’t intended to let one supersoldier sleep in his closet only to wake up with another supersoldier asleep in front of his closet, but there wasn’t any way to avoid it.

Wherever Steve was Bucky was too.

Sam took it pretty well, and just demanded payment in the form of pancakes. Steve was pretty good at making pancakes. 

* * *

Bruce couldn’t handle treating Steve and no outsiders were trusted enough that they could be brought in to examine him so that was another thing that fell to Sam. 

"How much do you know?" Steve asked through his computer. 

Sam spread his hands. "Why don't we say I know nothing and go from there?"

"Because I don't like talking about it. How much do you know?"

Sam smiled and shrugged, conceding the point. His smile went away when he spoke. 

"I know that you were sexually abused. I know that at some point most of your tongue was removed and that you need a special diet. I know that your arm was broken and your thumb was amputated. You're significantly underweight, you're not sleeping unless it's in my closet. You nearly died of cyanide poisoning less than a month ago. That's about it, man. You tell me. What else do I need to know?"

Steve toyed with his laptop. 

"You're my friend," he said. "I shouldn't be dumping any of this on you."

"There's nobody else. No one we can tell about you."

"Dr. Cho?"

"She's been a HYDRA prisoner for years."

Steve closed his eyes and scrubbed his mangled hand over his face Then started typing. 

"Pierce had me lobotomized about six months ago. It took a couple months for my brain to start working right again. But that's probably worth checking."

"Jesus. Yeah. Yeah, we should look into that."

Steve drummed his fingers on the desktop and stared at the ceiling.

"I've been castrated for a little over a year."

Sam didn't say anything. 

"The cut is healed. But I don't know if the muscle loss and reduced appetite is related to the loss of testosterone production."

Sam took what seemed like a deep, calming breath. 

"We should do some bloodwork and figure out what your levels are, we can experiment with HRT from there."

Steve nodded. There wasn't really anything else to do.

* * *

He couldn't tell how he felt about Bucky, some days. 

It was ironic, after spending so much time trying to keep him safe and wishing he could hold him again it was difficult for Steve to be in the same room as Bucky sometimes. 

But sometimes it was okay. 

Steve tended to dissociate in the shower. That was Sam's word for it. Steve didn't call it anything, he just knew that under the running water he ended up waiting for a keeper to come finish cleaning his insides or demand to use his mouth. 

So Bucky sat on the counter and kept up a patter about baseball and sandwiches and bullets and books and whatever else came into his head. 

Steve didn't say anything back, obviously, but he'd laugh or once in a while he'd pull back the curtain and make a scandalized noise at one of Bucky's opinions. 

One day they were sitting in the living room of the suite they didn't sleep in, and Steve broke the comfortable silence with his typing. 

"They used you too?"

Bucky looked up from his book and nodded.

"I'm sorry," Steve said. "I'm sorry they hurt you. Sorry they had you."

Bucky looked searchingly at Steve's face. "Can I kiss you?"

Steve smiled and leaned closer, reaching up to sift his fingers through Bucky's hair while he pulled their mouths together. Steve's approach to kissing had changed - he had loved to lick into Bucky's mouth, teasing his tongue at the seam of his lips and tasting the smile on Bucky's face. Now he tended to suck at Bucky's lower lip before nuzzling their faces closer together and opening his mouth a little to encourage Bucky to take over.

This time he just gently pressed their lips together and let them both feel each other's heat, smell each other's skin, close and real and home in a horrible new world where nothing else felt right. 

"I'm sorry they had you too, sweetheart. I'm sorry I helped them keep you."

Steve made a wounded, offended noise, Bucky kissed him again. 

"I wish none of it had ever happened, but I'm glad we're here right now."

Steve made a somewhat happier sound and let Bucky's hands settle on his waist. 

Before the ice there wasn't much they could have called their lovemaking aside from fucking - it had been high energy and dirty, messy and athletic and fun even when Steve had been tiny and asthmatic. Now what they did was too careful to be that vulgar, each attempt as precise and cautious as defusing a bomb. 

Steve had to be reminded constantly that he didn't have to passively accept Bucky touching him, had to be encouraged to move. Bucky had to be forced to the surface, reminded that this wasn't a mission. It was bittersweet for both of them, more likely to end in a flashback than an orgasm, but that didn't keep them from trying. 

Bucky pulled Steve off the couch and arranged him against the wall, facing the plaster and trembling with want as his clothes were carefully pulled away. Sometimes the wall didn't work, Steve would find himself staring blankly at the featureless paint and waiting for the plug to descend and implacably fill him. But standing was always better than being on his hands and knees and it was hard to forget that he was free and safe when Bucky spread his cheeks and ran a hot, wet tongue over his hole. Steve squeaked at the sensation and Bucky's hand reached out for Steve's and guided it to his dick. 

Steve could get hard now, could want now, since he'd started taking two little shots each day - he couldn't always come, but he could want to again, and sometimes it seemed like that alone was enough. 

Bucky had always loved eating Steve out, and it was one of the few things his handlers had never asked of him so he could focus on it and revel in it and not worry about getting pulled into programming. He set about working his tongue into Steve and periodically reaching for his cock to make sure he was still stroking himself and present in the moment. Steve whined and arched his back and Bucky rewarded the motion by sucking at Steve's rim and teasing the skin around his hole with a hint of teeth.

Steve felt hot and shivery and was surprised to find himself feeling empty, hungry, and wanting more.

He moaned with it, and tried to speak. 

It turned out that all the sounds in the phrase "fuck me" were sounds he could still make.

Bucky pulled his mouth free. 

"Honey, what?"

Steve laughed. They'd found out early that "Bucky" was still one of his words so he said it now. 

"Bucky, fuck me, fuck me, puh-ee."

Bucky groaned and got to his feet, still holding Steve's hips he ground his hard cock against Steve's ass and bit his shoulder. 

"Jesus, sweetheart, thought I was having a flashback. You sound like you did in the war when you say that. Say it again."

"Fuck me," Steve said, and listened as it came out of his mouth. Bucky was right. It sounded like him again, his own deep voice, his needy, commanding tone, with no slurring or dropped letters. 

"Fuck," Steve said, and this time it came out much flatter. "Fuck. Fuck! _Fuck!_ " Steve slammed his fist against the wall and Bucky stepped away while Steve started tugging up his boxers. 

"Sweetheart?"

Steve waved his hand and grunted angrily, signing _No,_ while he hunted down his shirt. 

Bucky wasn't great at interpreting signs yet but he knew that one. He pulled his own pants back up and went to brush his teeth and wash his face while Steve stormed around. He was waiting patiently on the couch when Steve dropped himself into an armchair with his laptop. 

"I can't say 'I love you' but I can beg to get fucked," he typed. 

Bucky laughed. "Okay, yeah, that's a kick in the dick. I can see where that would kill the mood."

Steve spread his hands and raised his eyebrows in a "right?!" gesture and laughed too. 

Eventually Steve sprawled against him on the couch and they managed to fall asleep someplace other than Sam's floor for once. 

Some days Steve wasn't sure how he felt about Bucky. But most of the time there was no question. 

* * *

Bruce was shuffling through papers on the least-cluttered surface in the lab. Sam was beside him, a calm voice in case Bruce started having trouble. Tony was nowhere to be seen but from the half-finished projects on every table and counter it was clear he spent a lot of time working in this room.

Steve's laptop spoke. 

"How are things with Tony?"

Bruce shrugged. 

"Not. Um. Not great. We're taking it day by day."

Sam gave a terse smile. "Deradicalization is a messy process even when someone has made the decision to walk away from the extremists. He's on our side for the long haul but he spent a long time internalizing really toxic ideologies."

Steve snorted and Sam rolled his eyes. 

"Some of which, admittedly, he held before HYDRA got its hooks in him."

Steve hummed, then typed. 

"Rumlow?"

"He’s working hard," Bruce said. "The disillusionment with HYDRA's mission started before he came to us. We're thinking about taking him on a recon trip. Something low-stakes and heavily supervised."

Steve made a face. That seemed like a terrible idea. Sam nodded in agreement and sighed. "You can't win 'em all." He plucked a paper off the top of the stack Bruce had organized. "Enough deflecting. We're here to talk about you, not them."

Steve tapped the table sharply and made a gesture for them to continue. 

"Your hormone levels have stabilized and imaging shows no lasting damage from the neurological procedures," Bruce said. "But all of that is secondary to your emotional state. Steve, you are in no way ready to go back into the field and I'm honestly kind of surprised that you asked. You know better."

Steve threw up his hands and started typing. 

"My emotional state is fine."

Bruce shook his head. 

"Try that line again when you can sleep in your own quarters three nights in a row and don't get triggered into a panic attack by the sight of a sink nozzle."

Steve flushed an ugly red color and hunched his shoulders, Bruce took a deep breath. 

"You wouldn't put me on a submarine if I was angry, I can't clear you to run missions until you're more stable. It wouldn't be safe for you or your team."

Steve huffed and typed. 

"What about the thing you were planning for Rumlow? Low stakes and heavily supervised. I can handle a recon run, especially with backup. And Brock is powered now. You can't send him out without an enhanced crew."

Bruce looked uncomfortable so Sam spoke up. 

"Bucky is on the team for that mission and we want to minimize your contact with Rumlow."

"Fuck!" Steve shouted, startling Bruce and Sam into silence. "Fuck," he said more calmly, and began typing again. "So Bucky is stable enough for missions, isn't a panic risk."

Sam reached out a hand and gripped Steve's shoulder. "Yeah, man. I'm sorry. But as of right now he's in a better headspace than you are except in a couple of thoroughly predictable ways. We know what sets him off. He's _told_ us what sets him off. You're still getting surprised by your own triggers."

It was very clear that the only reason Steve didn't snap his laptop at that was through force of will. 

"How do I fix it, then. How do I not be broken? Because I lived in a box for a year and I'm not going to live in another."

Bruce was audibly doing breathing exercises, which was as strong an indicator as possible that it was time to tone down the conversation. 

"Being stuck here, panicking, not doing anything, it makes me feel like they broke me. It makes me feel like I can't get better, like I will be like this forever. Tell me how to get better. Tell me how not to feel like this anymore."

Sam cleared his throat. "Well, asking for help is a good start. So is regaining independence."

"I think I'm a little screwed on that front until more of you all learn how to sign."

Bruce and Sam made tense eye contact then looked away from each other. 

"Wha?" Steve asked. 

"Tony made you something," Bruce said, "but. We're not - I don't -"

"We're not sure how much we trust Tony and we're really not sure how much you trust Tony."

Steve put a hand in the air and wobbled it in a so-so gesture. "What is it?"

Bruce put a small case on top of his paperwork and opened it to reveal a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. "The Somewhat Talkative Enhanced Vocalization Intelligent-ish Entity. STEVIE," he said with a grimace. 

Steve raised an eyebrow. 

"It's essentially a really smart dictionary that tracks eye movements. It's an enhancement of the speaking system Stephen Hawking used. Which, Tony says, is why it's called STEVIE."

Steve rolled his eyes. 

"So I look through the glasses and they show me words and say them?"

Bruce nodded and tapped a touchpad on the desk next to him to bring up a schematic. "Essentially, yes. The system is supposed to learn your speaking patterns, and eventually sound natural as you become more familiar with it. This one was trained on recordings we had of you from mission comms and old speeches."

Steve scowled. "So it says everything I want to say and knows my speech patterns and what, stores it on some server that phones home to HYDRA?"

Sam shook his head. "That's part of what we were worried about but it looks like it's all stored locally."

Steve's frown deepened.

"It houses a computer capable of handling the processing power needed for machine learning, a dictionary loaded with the English language, enough battery power to be useful, and speakers loud enough for conversation in the frame of a pair of glasses?"

Bruce laughed. "I always wish I could have video of you saying things like that to show to everyone who thinks you're a luddite. Yeah. Somehow Tony figured out how to miniaturize computers even more. It holds a charge for a week of continuous use and then needs to charge in a docking station that also does a password protected, triple encrypted local backup so you don't lose your customized profile if you lose your glasses. We checked both the frames and the docking station and neither the schematics nor the prototypes include any sort of antenna or data transmitting connection."

Steve hummed and held out a hand for the glasses. 

The display came up before Steve settled the frames on his face, a blue more sedate than the typical electric shade Tony used for his projections. 

Steve put the glasses on and blinked rapidly as words and lines swirled around the periphery of his vision.

"Calibrating," said a male voice in his ear, instructing him to look up, down, left, right, and to blink rapidly. Once he had finished the setup sequence a cursor blinked unobtrusively in the lower right corner of his vision. 

He looked at it and the alphabet popped up, looked at "C" and about a dozen words appeared. He settled on "can" blinked intentionally, and was off to a second word. 

"Can you hear me," the glasses said, and Steve realized the voice from the calibration was his voice, and it was coming out of the tiny speakers on the frames. Tony had literally given Steve his voice back.

Sam had a huge grin on his face and Bruce was a little teary.

"Reading you loud and clear, Cap."

Steve concentrated on the display. "So at the moment we're not...concerned that Tony might be...capturing...data from these." 

Bruce shrugged. "At the moment, no. There doesn't appear to be a way for him to do so since it's all hard wired together and doesn't broadcast any signals, but maybe don't have any sensitive conversations with them on until we've done further testing. 

"They have...speakers, do they have a... microphone?"

"No," Sam said, "not that we could identify."

"They're great. They're....incredible. Am I...restricted from seeing Tony too?"

Sam's face went carefully neutral and Bruce flinched. The reactions were so disparate that Steve laughed. "What? Did I say something?"

Sam cracked a smile at that. "You're not restricted from seeing Tony. You're not even restricted from seeing Rumlow, though I wouldn't recommend it. But Tony doesn't want to see you. We didn't chase him out of here, he begged to leave."

Steve started packing up his laptop. "Well that's just too bad for Tony."

* * *

The Avengers compound in upstate New York had once been one of Tony's dozens of properties. When HYDRA had taken over Insight had targeted millions of people, at least a dozen of whom were at the compound on the day the helicarriers rose. 

It had been abandoned, and stayed that way even when Tony changed sides. The manor house on the property was scarred from Insight, with great ragged holes in the roof that had been filled with ivy and claimed by the local wildlife in the intervening years. 

If Steve had been looking for Tony at the compound they both used to know he would have looked in the opulent, five-room master suite. 

Those rooms belonged to raccoons now, so Steve was looking in the equipment room. 

The top structure of the compound had been destroyed, but there were four subfloors made of nuclear hardened concrete that housed everything from a quinjet hangar to personal bedrooms to a training room and an enormous kitchen. 

Tony had voluntarily ceded access to his suits and his AI, requiring an authorization code from Bruce or Natasha to do any heavy lifting in terms of technology. But he'd also go crazy if he didn't have a project or seven running in the background so he spent a lot of time in the lab developing things like the STEVIE glasses and even more time in the equipment room as a kind of digital blacksmith who was continually repairing and improving the tools that the surviving Avengers used to fight against HYDRA.

He was sitting on one of the blue workout mats, fiddling with one of Sam's wing joints, when Steve walked in. 

"Thank you for the glasses, Tony," Steve said through the frames. 

It made the smaller man jump, then drop the part he was working on with a curse. 

"Of course, of course. No problem, what're friends for? So, uh, you decided to use them?"

Steve nodded. "To...practice with them at least. See how they feel."

"I, uh, Bruce has a copy of the schematics and if you wanted a different color or, uh, a, you know, a version you're sure I didn't put evil HYDRA mind control commands into he can probably make it for you."

Steve smiled. "I like this color."

Tony choked and turned away from Steve, digging through a bin of scuffed armor. 

"Can you tell me more about how they work? The...machine...learning?"

Tony's shoulders hunched up and he ducked his head. 

"The, uh, the main dictionary is the standard thousand most common words, kindergarten stuff. You've probably already noticed the lag when you're looking for less standard words, like 'machine' - the learning algorithm isn't really all that complicated, it's frequency based, if you say 'canker' more than "color" it'll learn that canker gets pushed up and color gets pushed down and eventually the first couple screens of words will fit your style better and the lag will drop off. Then the selection screens will learn how your eyes scan for new words and they'll start organizing based on that instead of a standard, boring, left-right, up-down grid. That's, uh, that's all that gets saved, that's your profile. It doesn't listen to what you're saying or record your words in order. Just. Frequency. And eye movement."

Steve hummed. "You didn't have to do this for me, Tony. It means a lot."

Tony unburied his arms from the bin he was digging in, but hunched his shoulders up more. "I'm glad you like them. I hope it helps. Can you please leave? Please?"

Steve considered it, but he was feeling mulish. Tony could do this for him, could apologize, could look Steve in the eye and see a person, but still had trouble humanizing all the people he'd helped to imprison. Tony felt guilty, but all of his guilt was for hurting Steve, not for perfecting the helicarrier targeting systems or breaking encryption on resistance messages.

Steve sometimes liked to inflict himself on Tony, a punishment. Guilt for all the people he wouldn't let himself feel guilty for. 

"You used to think I was stuck up when I didn't ... pal around with the team."

"Yeah, well, things change. I was wrong about a lot of things then."

Steve huffed in frustration. He wanted to keep needling Tony but it didn't seem fair after he'd admitted to being wrong even once in his rich and privileged life. "Sure. Thanks for the glasses, Tony."

Steve left the equipment room quickly but didn't know where to go from there. He didn't want to work out, didn't want to go home and see Bucky when he was freshly frustrated about not getting cleared for missions. He'd be an asshole if he went back to pester Tony and had been monopolizing Sam's time too much already. 

Steve ended up pacing the halls of the compound until Natasha nearly hip checked him into the empty cafeteria and bullied him into sitting down with a cup of sugary tea.

It was easiest to be around Natasha sometimes. She didn't talk much and she signed as fluently as Clint ever had. 

"Your bad mood is visible from space."

Steve rolled his eyes and sighed. 

Nat drank some of her own tea, jam-sweetened and fragrant. 

"If you promise to stay in the jet there's an op I could use some backup on."

Steve raised an eyebrow.

"I'm raiding an office building. It should be quiet and easy but the entrance I'm using is too small to take a team in with me and if anything goes wrong it would be nice to have someone who can smash through walls nearby."

Steve nodded, then drank his tea.

* * *

Natasha's project was as bland and easy as she said it would be. They landed the cloaked jet on the roof of a building in Delaware, she climbed into some ducting, and twenty minutes later she climbed out of the same narrow metal vent. 

Steve was both relieved and frustrated. He was glad to be out of the compound, even if it felt like Nat was just letting him play dress-up. And as much as he wanted to be back in a fight he was glad no walls needed to be broken down and that Nat had finished her job safely. 

Then she surprised him. 

"Fly us somewhere quiet," she said, plugging a thumb drive into one of the terminals behind the cockpit, "I think my timeline just got moved up a bit."

Steve nodded back at her and took off, landing them in a dark patch of farmland after ten minutes of flight. 

He walked back into the hold and shamelessly looked over Natasha's shoulder. 

"What's up?" He signed. He'd left Stark's glasses in the locker room when he changed into combat gear. 

"HYDRA sells prisoners. They've got Clint's wife and son."

Steve nodded. 

"I saw boy, before."

"Well, I'm not sure where Nate is but right now Laura is with a group they're taking to Florida. Right now as in _now_. As in they're in transit on a train."

"I don't have good luck on trains," Steve said, "you call the others, I fly south."

Natasha cracked a tired little grin at him. 

"Try not to act too happy. James is going to tear me a new asshole for dragging you into a mission when you're not cleared."

"That sounds like a you problem," he said, laughing, and then took them into the air.

Twenty minutes later Tony caught up to them in the suit before the second quinjet could even get close.

“What’s our plan, fearless leader,” he said through the comms. Steve briefly got frustrated that he couldn’t answer before he got more frustrated remembering he wasn’t anybody’s leader anymore.

Nat didn’t look over at him as she answered.

“We’ll overtake the train in about three minutes. It’s going to be absolutely crawling with STRIKE teams. You any better at flying planes than you were in the forties, Steve?”

Steve snorted. Since he couldn’t go on missions he’d spent most of his free, non-therapy time in the last two months on a flight simulator, and he’d been a competent enough flier before that.

“You’re going to get in front of the train and fly low. Make it brake. We’re coming up on about eight miles of flat land in just a minute - after that it’s curves and a tunnel and we won’t be able to get them until they’re on the other side of the hill and closer to a city for reinforcements. Can you do that? Fly low and pace the train until it stops? If you can’t then we go ahead faster and rip out the tracks.”

Steve shook his head. Derailing the plane could kill the prisoners.

“Uh, Spider Baby, I know Captain Fantastic there _is_ pretty fantastic but he doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head. How’s he going to pace the train?”

Nat glared out the window. “You’re going to be the eyes in the back of his head. Tell Steve when to drop speed.”

“Why don’t I just save us all the trouble and stop the train?”

Steve grunted and sketched a couple signs at Natasha.

“Steve says they’d smash you like a bug. He’s right. You two work together until the train is stopped then Tony you’re with me - grab me from the hold as soon as we set down and take us back to the fifth car, it’s where they’ve got the bulk of the prisoners.”

“Ay!” Steve said, and gestured emphatically at himself. 

Nat smiled sweetly. “If you’re such a good pilot you should stay with the jet to make sure we can get out quick with the hostages.”

Steve glared and flipped her off, but saw the train ahead of them and was closing the distance too quickly to argue. 

In seconds he was ahead of the three huge engines and kept them in his vision while he slowed down to pace the train then moved up a few hundred yards in front of it and began to descend. 

Natasha flipped through open channels on the radio until she found a jumble of panicked voices shouting about the jet. Steve smiled and got lower, flying only twenty or so feet above the ground.

“It’s already bleeding speed, Steve,” Tony called, “and I’d tell you to say that three times fast but even I’m not that much of an asshole. They’ve fallen back by about a hundred yards, take it down.”

Steve grunted and rolled his eyes. It figured that the first time he got to do anything in the field he’d have to work with Tony. 

“Slow up some more, they’re really stomping on the brakes. You scared ’em enough I’m surprised they haven’t jumped the tracks.”

In another minute Steve and Tony had peacefully negotiated the train to a stop and Steve landed in front of it on the tracks, surrounded by farmland for miles and absurdly pleased to have stopped the huge machine. He put down the ramp to the hold and stood to follow Natasha.

She glared at him. “You aren’t cleared, Steve. Stay here.”

He rolled his eyes at her and signed as Tony flew closer. “Don’t have to follow you to cover you right now.” Steve reached into the weapons cabinet and pulled out a light carbine rifle then crouched on the ramp inside the jet and aimed generally at the engineer’s cabin of the train before looking back at her matter-of-factly. He tried to make his face as bland and innocent as possible. Nat pursed her lips but nodded. 

“Do not follow us. We’re bringing prisoners back here in two minutes and the rest of the team should be here in less than five. Stay on the jet.”

And then she was gone. Tony swooped in and carried her away and Steve was alone with a rifle staring at movement behind the windows of the train. 

Nobody seemed to be rushing out to challenge him, which was honestly a bit of a letdown. 

He wasn’t tempted to get off the jet. He wanted to be cleared again, he wanted to run missions again. He wasn’t going to get that by proving that he was irresponsible and impulsive. 

Steve heard the other quinjet set down after a short wait and then heard a few bursts of sudden gunfire. He took deep breaths and kept his relaxed hold on the rifle in his hands, ready to shoot if he needed to but not jittery on the trigger. 

There were voices shouting not too far off, and the sound of footsteps approaching quickly through the gravel.

It took all of Steve’s willpower not to shoot Rumlow as he rounded the edge of the ramp and smiled up into the jet.

“I heard you’d been doing real good, baby. They let you out to drive the taxi today?”

Steve huffed in irritation and stayed in his crouch, sighting down the rifle barrel to watch for any motion from the train. Brock hopped onto the ramp and took a step into the hold. Steve ignored him.

“You look good. Back up to fighting weight. They find a way to grow your bits back or did you just stuff the suit?”

Steve let his eyes move coolly to Rumlow, assessing the threat without glaring. 

“You’re being pretty quiet. If you don’t have your tongue back I’m guessing you don’t have your balls either. You still soft for me down there? Still got that pretty little patch for me to play with?”

Steve didn’t flinch, didn’t swing the rifle barrel toward Rumlow. He heard an uptick in shouting and listened for more feet approaching in the gravel alongside the tracks. He stood up smoothly from his crouch and let his thumbprint open the weapons storage cabinet before making sure he used his thumbprint to close it. He turned his back on Rumlow and walked back to the cockpit.

“Oh, you want more privacy to play with me?” Brock said, closer behind Steve than he’d expected.

Steve tapped a button on the console and a keyboard appeared. 

“We’re on a mission, shithead,” he typed out and waited while it was projected through the speakers. “Go back to your position, I’m evacuating with prisoners ASAP.”

Brock laughed. 

“They’re gonna be a little while, baby. The bait is keeping your pals busy while our planes scramble. They woulda started moving as soon as the train deviated from its schedule, we’ll have you on your way back home in five minutes, sugar, I hear they kept your spot in the locker room open.”

Steve felt like he’d been emptied out. All his fear and nightmares and the cold, scared spaces inside of him evaporated and all that was left was the piss-angry soul of a scrawny mick kid who didn’t like bullies.

Rumlow had his gun out and was pointing it at Steve; before he could even process a plan he’d yanked the Rumlow’s wrists forward and followed through by getting a hand on the back of his head and smashing his face into the back of the pilot’s chair with a horrible crunching sound. Steve didn’t bother to check whether he was breathing before he darted down the ramp to the tracks.

He couldn’t let the train start moving but even he wasn’t strong enough to shove the engine aside so he did the next best thing and ripped up about twenty feet of track, grinding his teeth at the effort and feeling something twang horribly in his mangled forearm as he tossed the rail aside.

Steve ran back into the jet and threw himself into the cockpit, getting the idle plane back into the air in twenty seconds, happy he’d never powered down the thrusters.

It took no time to fly the length of the train and see the other quinjet near the final car and to notice the smoking hole on the roof of the fifth car. Everything else was eerily quiet. 

He thumbed the switch for the loudspeakers and then stared, horrified at the mic.

He had to try.

“Ge- ou- ’ow,” he shouted. The panicked channel Nat had tuned to when they landed was eerily silent.

“Fuck!” He shouted into the mic. “Bucky! Ow,” and he growled in frustration before he hit on a word. “Evac! Evac evac ’ow!”

One of the jet’s comms crackled.

“Steve we’ve got some problems down here,” Bucky’s voice came through the console, “are you in the air?”

“Yef,” he said, “Whe?”

“Two cars back from the fire. If you can land on the next car I could really use your help ripping this roof open, sweetheart.”

Steve laughed over the comm and put the jet down lightly. It was a tight fit but he’d spent a lot of time in the simulator. He turned it around so the ramp would be closest to the car Bucky described, slapped the release near the ramp that opened the mounted case with his shield, then jogged down to the train.

The steel roof of the car was dented out and as Steve approached another dent appeared with a deafening clang. Bucky was trying to punch his way out. Steve rapped his knuckles against the deformed metal.

“Back up,” he shouted, delighted to be finding so many useful words on such a lovely, stupid day gone wrong, and cheerfully drove the edge of his shield into the bulging steel, gouging open a hole that he was able to easily get a grip on and rip back right as a vibranium hand shot through the opening and started pushing the space wider.

Steve wasn’t sure when he’d started, but he was laughing. He opened the top of the car with Bucky and started dragging people up as they were pushed toward him, then pointing them toward the jet. Dirty, thin children and women were handed up to him and soon enough Natasha was standing beside Steve and Tony was ferrying prisoners to the further quinjet and the sun was shining and the air was full of smoke and Steve laughed until the traincar was empty and Bucky shoved him back toward the plane with a concerned smile. 

Steve grinned and felt feral and awful as he jogged back and got the bird in the air.

The prisoners in the hold gave Steve a wide berth as he headed back to the cockpit, and a few of them were staring wide-eyed at the puddle of Rumlow behind the captain’s chair. A ragged woman with bluntly-cut hair was glaring at the body as it breathed bubbles of blood. She turned her glare on Steve and he recognized her.

“Hi Laura,” he signed, “ready?”

“Is Brock Rumlow?” She replied. He indicated that he could hear her, then nodded an answer to her question and was unsurprised when the heel of her bare foot came down on the unconscious man’s neck. Steve waved at her to get her attention and she looked up. 

“He has powers now. Step harder.” 

“Steve!” Natasha shouted as she saw what he’d signed; she was slamming her hand on the button that closed the ramp. “Get us back to the compound. Laura, don’t kill that asshole until we figure out what went wrong here.” She tried to put on her scariest face to dampen the mood. It didn’t work. Steve couldn’t stop laughing.

* * *

One of the nice things about being mute and crippled was that nobody expected you to handle after-action logistics.

Natasha directed Bruce and Sam to do triage on prisoners, Tony carried an exhausted Nate to Laura, and a whole bunch of people who didn’t need translators got down to the business of helping the people they’d rescued and figuring out where the mission had gone wrong.

It was too busy and hectic for anyone to talk to Steve. Someone would ask him more questions later, so he simply signed to Bucky that Rumlow needed to be contained and then made his way back to their suite.

He was showering happily, still grinning manically and cackling once in awhile, when Bucky joined him in the stream of hot water. 

Dealing with Tony could be a pain in the ass but even in the apocalypse he came with some nice amenities. 

“I can’t stop laughing,” Steve signed. “Sorry.”

Bucky put a cold metal hand on his shoulder and turned Steve around to face him, checking for obvious injuries. 

“What’s got you all giddy, sweetheart? You feeling okay?”

Steve shrugged and kissed the cold curve of Bucky’s wrist. “Good day. Bad things happened, but good day anyway.”

Bucky let the water run over his body and soak his hair before he spoke again.

“You got to be in the field. Did pretty good.”

Steve nodded.

“You know you’re not ready to go back, though.”

Steve nodded again. “Not stable. Saw that. I know. Scared prisoners. Need to talk to Sam. Therapy. CBT. Blah Blah. But. Good day.”

Bucky swallowed. Steve looked down and saw that the water running off his metal arm was coming off a little red.

He raised his eyebrow at the incriminating dripping.

“You know there’s video monitoring in the jets, yeah?”

Steve cocked his head to the side.

Bucky clenched his jaw.

“Brock didn’t make it.”

Steve laughed and signed again. “Good day.”

Bucky laughed a little too. “Yeah, I guess it was.”

And if they didn’t talk much more, and if they held onto each other a little too tight, and if they fell a little more in love with holding on to each other, well. Those things made it a good day too. 

**The End.**

**Author's Note:**

> Tony ends up working with hydra and rapes steve in the box while he doesn't realize it's Steve. 
> 
> Clint ends up working with hydra, gets stuck in a box of his own, gets fucked nearly to death, gets killed by his handlers, and his body is fucked by one of the handlers. 
> 
> Steve's tongue is mostly removed and doesn't come back. 
> 
> Steve severs some of his fingers and breaks his arm in order to castrate himself.
> 
> Steve is lobotomized and is sexually abused while incapacitated from the resulting brain injury (this gets better)


End file.
